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

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Author: Patrice Mannoni
Date:  
To: tails-dev
Subject: Re: [Tails-dev] Substitute Tor-launcher with Anon-Connection-Wizard in Tails?
I highly recommend against this. And hope it isn't implemented over the
short-term.


On 30/08/2017 18:52, iry wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
>
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