Hi,
Today I attended a meeting with the Tor people designing some automation
for Tor Launcher, as a way of making it better at censorship
circumvention because letting the user find and configure bridges has
been a disaster so far.
Most of the discussion evolves around UX and finding the right
thread-off between enough automation to become easier but not too much
to become dangerous. But I don't want to discuss this here and just
meant to let you know :)
You can read their design document here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/119plBq2oIeNS3okHCBNaBSqm_a1jJObYxKB_n6jodoQ/edit#
And the notes of the meeting here:
http://meetbot.debian.net/tor-project/2017/tor-project.2017-06-02-18.04.log.html
tails-ux: I don't think we should discuss any UX aspect here, but feel
free to join the process at Tor if you want.
tails-dev: Part of my mission was to ask two more technical questions
but apparently it's too early to answer both of them with certainty:
18:47:50: #1: What kind of network connections will Tor Launcher
initiate *itself* (as opposed to asking little-t-tor to)? None?
The answer is unclear but Tor Launcher will probably initiate some
network activity of its own, for example to start meek-client to talk to
bridgedb.
18:58:56: #3: Any news on the possible language and coding dependencies
for this new Tor Launcher? How easy is it going to be to reuse it in
Tails? :)
The answer is unclear as well but mcs says that they will likely not
have enough time to create a completely new Tor Launcher.
Hope it's useful :)