Archive

Thanks to a friend who's a professor at KAIST in Korea, several teams of students there are working for their "freshman design class" on designing new bridge (aka bridge relay) distribution strategies. Here's some early brainstorming on what the actual problems are and what needs doing. read more »

Vidalia 0.2.4 is released. The OS X -alpha bundles are updated to fix a bug in the default "bootstrap" vidalia.conf file that pointed to a non-existent Polipo configuration file, causing Polipo to fail on startup.

The Changelog for this release is: read more »

• Split the message log into "Basic" and "Advanced" views. The
  "Advanced" view contains standard log messages from Tor, while the new
  experimental "Basic" view displays status events received from Tor.
  (Ticket #265)
• Apply an application-global stylesheet on OS X that forces all tree
  widgets in Vidalia to use the 12pt font recommended by Apple's human
  interface guidelines.
• Add an OSX_FORCE_32BIT CMake option that can be used to force a 32-bit
  build on Mac OS X versions that default to 64-bit builds (e.g., Snow
  Leopard), if only 32-bit versions of the Qt libraries are available.
• Fix a bug introduced in 0.2.3 that prevented Vidalia from correctly
  

Throughout the summer I've been working on a project called 'arm' (which stands for the 'anonymizing relay monitor'). It's a real-time, terminal monitor for Tor relays providing bandwidth/cpu/memory usage, relay configuration, event log, connections, and other details relay operators might find handy for checking Tor's status. The project's intended for command-line aficionados, ssh connections, and anyone stuck with a tty terminal.

Source, screen shots, and a development log are available on the project's page and an interview by Brenno Winter discussing the project is available here. read more »

On August 27th, we released Vidalia 0.2.3. This fixes some more bugs with "Who has used by bridge" functionality and switches to Qt signals for event handling.

The updated Vidalia packages can be found at https://www.torproject.org/vidalia

The changes are: read more »

• Create the data directory before trying to copy over the default
  Vidalia configuration file from inside the application bundle on Mac
  OS X. Affects only OS X drag-and-drop installer users without a
  previous Vidalia installation.
• Change all Tor event handling to use Qt's signals and slots mechanism
  instead of custom QEvent subclasses.
• Fix another bug that resulted in the "Who has used my bridge?" link
  initially being visible when the user clicks "Setup Relaying" from
  the control panel if they are running a non-bridge relay.
  (Ticket #509, reported by "vrapp")
• Always hide the "Who has used my bridge?" link when Tor isn't running,
  

As highlighted in the 0.2.2.1-alpha release notes, the Vidalia Bundle for OS X includes some major changes. Many of these are for ease of use and user experience improvements. The release of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) gave me a fine excuse to release the improvements.

It's best to un-install Tor/Vidalia and then install this new bundle; rather than upgrade. If you want to upgrade, you'll need to update the paths for Tor and Polipo in the Vidalia Settings window.

There has been a lot of testing since this test release of the drag and drop installer for OS X in January. The main goal was to make installation far easier, less error prone, and keep all of the bundle in a single directory for easier configuration and un-installation. read more »

Tor 0.2.2.1-alpha disables ".exit" address notation by default, allows
Tor clients to bootstrap on networks where only port 80 is reachable,
makes it more straightforward to support hardware crypto accelerators,
and starts the groundwork for gathering stats safely at relays.

https://www.torproject.org/download

We've been improving our packages and bundles:
Packaging changes: read more »

• Upgrade Vidalia from 0.1.15 to 0.2.3 in the Windows and OS X
  installer bundles. See
  https://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.2.3/CHAN...
  for details of what's new in Vidalia 0.2.3.
• Windows Vidalia Bundle: update Privoxy from 3.0.6 to 3.0.14-beta.
• OS X Vidalia Bundle: move to Polipo 1.0.4 with Tor specific
  configuration file, rather than the old Privoxy.
• OS X Vidalia Bundle: Vidalia, Tor, and Polipo are compiled as
  x86-only for better compatibility with OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard.

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.8 is released. The big changes are the inclusion of statically linked openssl dlls to resolve a few geoip lookup and functionality issues with Vidalia, and the upgrade to the new Vidalia 0.2.2.

Available at https://torproject.org/torbrowser

The full list of updates and fixes:

• update Torbutton to 1.2.2
• update Vidalia to 0.2.2
• compile OpenSSL 0.9.8k with Visual C to make dlls
• update Pidgin to 2.6.1

A while ago there was a thread on OR-TALK that devolved into

"why does Tor still ship ancient privoxy?"

and

"why are you shipping polipo with the Tor Browser Bundle instead of current privoxy?"

For those interested, the thread is here, http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jul-2009/msg00063.html.

Scott had a good argument for why we should update the bundles to the latest privoxy, and I agree, we should. But then I started thinking about why we needed a proxy at all. Almost all browsers support socks5 direct, isn't that faster than a middleman proxy?

This got me thinking about why polipo is in the TBB, but not the other packages. The TBB "feels faster" when using Tor than using the installed Tor, Vidalia, and Privoxy. However, I couldn't find any actual testing of performance of polipo vs. privoxy vs. socks5 direct. read more »