[Tails-dev] Substitute Tor-launcher with Anon-Connection-Wiz…

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Author: iry
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: [Tails-dev] Substitute Tor-launcher with Anon-Connection-Wizard in Tails?
Hi Tails developers!

Several months ago, anonym and I had a discussion about the future of
anon-connection-wizard on the @tor-dev[0], where he said:

> That said, this approach will not be viable any more some time next
> year when the Firefox ESR branch drops XUL support and Tor Launcher
> is deprecated upstream. It remains to see how the replacement of
> Tor Launcher will look, it might still work for Tails. However, if
> anon-connection-wizard would be a (more or less) drop-in
> replacement for Tor Launcher in Tails, that would be immensely
> helpful since we'd have a solution that will be guaranteed to work
> for us without much work. And I guess as long as the UX is more or
> less identical to the new Tor Launcher and rapidly adapts to
> changes, and there are good translations, we'd probably prefer it
> over the new Tor Launcher, since it probably will be even harder to
> decouple from the web browser.
>
> Any way, I also see potential for future collaboration between
> Whonix and Tails for extending the usefulness of
> anon-connection-wizard beyond what Tor Launcher (and its
> replacement) offers [2]; anon-connection-wizard targets the OS, not
> just a single application, so it could integrate the choices of
> network configuration (wired? which wireless network? MAC
> spoofing?) and Tor configuration (proxy? pluggable transport?) in a
> single place which probably makes more sense for users and also
> allows us to more easily (optionally) save these settings so they
> are restored the next time you visit the same network. This could
> potentially even be used to help giving users control over entry
> node selection to avoid persistent Entry Guards from leaking
> information about you geographical movement.


Now, though there are still a lot of improvements can be done,
anon-connection-wizard is mature enough to be integrated into the
upcoming Whonix14.

Therefore, I am wondering if Tails community still consider it as a
good idea to replace Tor-launcher with anon-connection-wizard when it
is mature enough?

Apart from what has been pointed out by anonym above, the following is
some information that may be helpful for your decision:

- - Here is a recent post introducing anon-connection-wizard which also
contains a set of screenshots of it[1]
- - the anon-connection-wizard UI is basing on Linda’s PET paper[2] and
Tor UX team’s proposal[3] to new Tor-launcher.
- - although anon-connection-wizard has not been packaged into Debian
repository, all its dependencies are already available in Debian
- - The future goal of anon-connection-wizard is to be packaged as a
generic standalone application into Debian so that it can be used by
different anonymity focused distributions like Whonix and Tails
- - anon-connection-wizard do not assume user has a Tor or Firefox
browser to use, which is a low-coupling design


Thank you very much!

I am looking forward to hearing your insights and having a further
discussion with you!

Best,
iry

[0]: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2017-March/012032.ht
ml
[1]:
https://forums.whonix.org/t/gsoc-with-tor-and-whonix-anon-connection-wiz
ard/4266
[2]: https://petsymposium.org/2017/papers/issue3/paper2-2017-3-source.pd
f
[3]: https://marvelapp.com/3f6102d/screen/31456320