Archive - Jul 2008

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June 2008 Progress Report

Posted July 22nd, 2008 by phobos
in

Torbutton 1.2.0rc1 (released June 1), the first release candidate for the next stable series of the security-enhanced Torbutton Firefox extension, features functional support for Firefox 3. However, this support has not been extensively tested. In particular, timezone masking does not work at all. The workaround is to manually set the environment variable 'TZ' to 'UTC' before starting Firefox. This works on both Linux and Windows:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00044.html

Tor 0.2.0.27-rc (released June 3) adds a few features we left out of the earlier release candidates. In particular, we now include an IP-to-country GeoIP database, so controllers can easily look up what country a given relay is in, and so bridge relays can give us some sanitized summaries about which countries are making use of bridges. (See proposal 126-geoip-fetching.txt for details.)
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00055.html

Torbutton 1.2.0rc2 (released June 8) features a fix for an annoying bug on MacOS, and adds much clamored for options to start Firefox in a specific Tor state:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00103.html

Tor 0.2.0.28-rc (released June 13) fixes an anonymity-related bug, fixes a hidden-service performance bug, and fixes a bunch of smaller bugs.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00165.html

Tor 0.2.1.1-alpha (released June 13) fixes a lot of memory fragmentation problems that were making the Tor process bloat especially on Linux; makes our TLS handshake blend in better; sends "bootstrap phase" status events to the controller, so it can keep the user informed of progress (and problems) fetching directory information and establishing circuits; and adds a variety of smaller features. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00185.html

Vidalia 0.1.4 (released June 13) adds a bootstrap progress bar, UPnP support, a new set of freely licensed GUI icons, and fixes a few bugs. read more »

Stable Torbutton Release Approaches

Posted July 6th, 2008 by mikeperry
in

For those of you just tuning in: Over the past year, I have been the maintainer of the Torbutton Firefox extension, adding a number of features and security enhancements to transform Torbutton from a simple proxy switcher into a secure way to fully isolate all browser state from one proxy state to another and defend against all known privacy and IP address leakage attacks.

The release candidate phase of the extension started about a month ago, but with the release of Firefox 3 and Torbutton 1.2.0rc series occurring at the same time, we've hit a number of unexpected rough spots and snags. However, with the 1.2.0rc5 release of Torbutton, I'm pleased to report that the majority of those now seem to be behind us (a few annoying Firefox bugs notwithstanding).

Thanks to contributions from arno, the Cookie Jar features now work with Firefox 3. They have even been improved to allow cookies to persist in memory-based jars across Tor toggle (as opposed to requiring Tor cookies to be written to disk to preserve them), which I personally already find very useful. read more »