Google funds an auto-update for Vidalia

the captcha works fine over tor.

sparkle is osx only? and not open source?

Dear anonymous person,

Are you sure you understood the post? Google is not funding us to stop working on privacy, to weaken our privacy, to endorse Google, to endorse their policies, to endorse their search engine, or to do anything anti-privacy. We would not take such funding from anybody if it were offered.

On the other hand, we will take funding to spend on developers to make Tor better, and that's what's been offered here. Google has been quite helpful to the open source world in the past. Have you heard of the Summer of Code program? This is the Tor Project's second year of participating in that, and contrary to what it seems you're suggesting, it hasn't made us stop supporting privacy.

>Besides, Google resides in the US, which is one of the leading countries giving a shit on "privacy" and "anonymity".

It sounds like you're proposing a funding model where, if we have any points of disagreement with a company or individual, or even if we do not like the policies of the country in which they reside, we do not accept help from them.

This would certainly make our project more appealing to people who believe that every incidence of funding constitutes an unconditional mutual endorsement, but it has a problem: we would be able to do almost no development at all.

>If TOR users are not able to update their clients themselves, they should not use programs as TOR, but rather stick to all the prgrams that offer everything possible to automate -and also hide- as much as possible and help make/keep the users minor and dependent.

Aside from the moral issues involved in giving up on helping people if they aren't good at computers, this suggestion would be bad for anonymity. Remember, anonymity systems like Tor hide users among other users. Dividing users into "power users" and "everybody else", and helping only the power users, would create a much smaller network population, and making the network population smaller makes it less anonymous. For more information, you might want to read Anonymity loves company: usability and the network effect.

yrs,
-Nick

I see at least one reason why supporting Tor makes sense for Google.

Say, Google isn't entirely evil and wants to provide some way to use its services anonymously, for those who need it. The problem is, they _have to_ record certain data under European data retention laws, whether they want it or not. (For example, German data retention law requires forum operators to track IPs of all posters, which means Google Groups _must_ keep record of all IPs. Failure to do so may result in criminal prosecution).
Tor, on the other hand, provides Google with a completely legal way to allow anonymous use: they fulfill their obligations by law (IP log is kept) but the poster remains anonymous.

I know a number of European forums and Usenet providers advising to use Tor for this exact reason: they warn users about logs they _must_ keep, and recommend to use Tor for those willing to stay anonymous.

No.

Woah, you're telling me that all Tor has to do is accept money from Google and all the crazies and paranoids will go somewhere else? Holy shit. Maybe or-talk will become usable again and people will think and read before posting insane drivel.

Fuck, I know a couple of people who work for Google already. I bet I can get them to give the Tor devs $5 each right now if it meant Tor might have a reasonable mailinglist and blog forum.

Why didn't the devs think of this earlier?? Pure genius!

If google is so beneficent, why are there so many addons for firefox to eliminate its tracking features? We don't have to be fully paid up members of the tinfoil hat brigade to be suspicious of this proposal.

Once Tor joins up with google, it will have lost its edge. Who will google try to buy out next? FoxyProxy? Or why not join up with Special Branch and the CIA to log every single use of Tor?

Good luck!