Yesterday I answered this on tails-project@??? because it's a much
wider discussion. See below.
I'm realizing now that alienpup is not subscribed to tails-project.
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
sajolida:
> alienpup:
>> Life's never been easy for the Tor Project, and it seems that both
>> political pressure and uninformed bias against the project continues
>> to increase. One result of this is that Tails users often encounter
>> sites and services that refuse connections from Tor exit nodes. This
>> problem has impacted me to the point that I've had to abandon TailOS
>> as my default daily OS.
>
> Thanks for sharing your experience and starting this discussion!
>
> I'm moving this to tails-project@ because it's a much wider discussion.
>
> Our doc says that:
>
> https://tails.boum.org/doc/about/tor
>
> « We want to enforce good security by default for our users. That is why
> it is a fundamental assumption of Tails to force all outgoing traffic
> to anonymity networks such as Tor. »
>
> https://tails.boum.org/support/faq#vpn
>
> « It is fundamental to Tails that all outgoing traffic be forced through
> Tor. We have no plans to make it possible to use a VPN instead of Tor
> in the future. »
>
> So, as a starting point, changing any of this will not happen overnight
> but would likely take years. But I do agree that it's an important
> discussion to have (and we probably won't reach strong conclusions only
> on mailing lists). It will also require major engineering work and our
> development capacity is still super limited (otherwise Tails would
> improve much faster).
>
> For the record, these UX issues are being discussed internally at Tor and
> Tor could end up exploring quite radical changes to solve them. Tor is
> not in a great shape right now and I would also expect any of this to
> take several years to happen:
>
> https://blog.torproject.org/covid19-impact-tor
>
> Tails is lucky to be in a better position than Tor in this regard as it
> has the possibility of offering VPNs as an alternative.
>
> For the record, the fact that Tor is painful for browsing the web was in
> the top 5 changes that people asked for in the survey that I did in
> July-August:
>
> https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/user_survey/
>
> In these results, I'm assuming somehow boldly that people who asked for
> VPNs were complaining about Tor being painful for browsing the web.
> It might not be their only reason but I guess that it's their main reason.
>
> To put all this in perspective, Tor usage in Hong Kong has been pretty
> much stagnant over the past years:
>
> https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2018-09-01&end=2020-09-01&country=hk&events=off
>
> While VPN usage has been skyrocketing:
>
> https://atlasvpn.com/blog/vpn-installs-in-hong-kong-surged-150-times-in-the-last-7-days
>
> Though I would take these self-reported data from Atlas VPN with a grain
> of salt.
>
> Blaming the user for the understanding that VPNs are not as secure as Tor
> or for not coping with the extra pain of using Tor is not the solution.
> Blaming the user is never the solution actually. And unfortunately, we
> can't fix Tor from Tails.
>
> In terms of personas:
>
> https://tails.boum.org/contribute/personas/
>
> * Riou might do well with a VPN for censorship circumvention.
>
> I'm told that people in Iran rely heavily on VPNs for accessing
> Facebook and Google.
>
> Riou also tries to hide their identity and might get jailed if their
> VPN collaborates with or gets hacked by their government. So there's
> clearly a critical and complicated trade-off here.
>
> * Cris could get killed if her VPN collaborates with or gets hacks by her
> government.
>
> But she currently lacks better communication tools in Tails (for
> example Signal) so she might already been relying on unencrypted
> communication tools (email, Facebook, etc.) that could get her in
> trouble just as much.
>
> * Kim would be just as fine with a VPN.
>
> Both Riou and Cris would be better protected from physical repression
> using Tails with a VPN than giving up on Tails entirely because browsing
> the web with Tor is too much of a pain.
>
>> IMHO, unsafe browser should not be included in TailsOS.
>
> The Unsafe Browser is meant as a tool to connect to captive portals:
>
> https://tails.boum.org/doc/anonymous_internet/unsafe_browser/
>
> We will need something like this anyway but have plans to improve this
> and hopefully provide something better than the Unsafe Browser for that.
