phobos's blog

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 »

I've updated the Tor Browser Bundle with torbutton 1.2.2, the new Vidalia 0.2.2, and openssl 0.9.8k compiled with Microsoft Visual C to handle ssl compatibility issues with various versions of Windows.

If this works, it will be the new Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.8. Please test away.

The full list of changes:

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

There is an issue for some people using a clean Windows XP, Vista, 7 which would either require we ship the Visual C redistributable package, or compile OpenSSL ourselves with Visual C. The symptoms were the "find bridges now" button didn't appear in Vidalia 0.2.x, and the relays would never get flags. A few people posted comments to this blog about lacking flags and geoip information with TBB. read more »

Vidalia 0.2.2 is released. It addresses an issue with openssl which causes the geoip lookups to fail on various versions of Windows. It also switches from the Nullsoft Installer to the Microsoft System Installer for better compatibility with Microsoft Windows.

There are now separate Apple OS X builds, one for PowerPC architectures and one for i386 architectures. No more Universal binary bloat to download.

The changes are: read more »

• When the user clicks "Browse" in the Advanced settings page to locate
  a new torrc, set the initial directory shown in the file dialog to the
  current location of the user's torrc. (Ticket #505)
• Use 'ditto' to strip the architectures we don't want from the Qt
  frameworks installed into the app bundle with the dist-osx,
  dist-osx-bundle and dist-osx-split-bundle build targets.
• Fix a bug in the CMakeLists.txt files for ts2po and po2ts that caused
  build errors on Panther for those two tools.

Vidalia 0.2.1 is now available. This is a test release of the 0.2.x branch, which we hope to soon make the mainline version; replacing the 0.1.x branch.

Vidalia can be downloaded at https://www.torproject.org/vidalia/.

Changelog: read more »

• Add a "Find Bridges Now" button that will attempt to automatically
  download a set of bridge addresses and add them to the list of bridges
  in the Network settings page.
• Add support for building with Google's Breakpad crash reporting
  library (currently disabled by default).
• Show or hide the "Who has used my bridge recently?" link along with
  the other bridge-related widgets when the user toggles the relay mode
  in the Network settings page. (Ticket #480)
• Tolerate bridge addresses that do not specify a port number, since Tor
  now defaults to using port 443 in such cases.
• Add support for viewing the map as a full screen widget when built
  with KDE Marble support.

New releases

On July 8th, we released Vidalia 0.1.15..

On July 8th, we updated the Tor 0.2.0.35-stable bundles with the new Vidalia to fix an ssl issue and the Firefox Torbutton extension installation for OS X users.

On July 8th, we released Tor 0.2.1.17-rc.

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.3 was released on July 8, 2009.
TBB 1.2.3 was replaced by 1.2.4 on July 11, 2009
TBB 1.2.5 was released on July 25th. It solely included an update to Tor 0.2.1.18 . read more »

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.7 is released. It is updated primarily due to Firefox 3.0.13 with its ssl fixes.

The full changelist is:

1.2.7: Released 2009-08-04

• update Firefox to 3.0.13
• add Polish translation
• update libevent to 1.4.12

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 are released.

The changes for the respective releases are:

1.2.5: Released 2009-07-25
update Tor to 0.2.1.18

1.2.6: Released 2009-07-28
update Tor to 0.2.1.19

Tor 0.2.1.18 lays the foundations for performance improvements, adds
status events to help users diagnose bootstrap problems, adds optional
authentication/authorization for hidden services, fixes a variety of
potential anonymity problems, and includes a huge pile of other features
and bug fixes.

Tor 0.2.1.19 fixes a major bug with accessing and providing hidden
services.

https://www.torproject.org/easy-download

Changes in version 0.2.1.19 - 2009-07-28
Major bugfixes:

• Make accessing hidden services on 0.2.1.x work right again.
  Bugfix on 0.2.1.3-alpha; workaround for bug 1038. Diagnosis and
  part of patch provided by "optimist".

Minor features:

• When a relay/bridge is writing out its identity key fingerprint to
  the "fingerprint" file and to its logs, write it without spaces. Now
  it will look like the fingerprints in our bridges documentation, read more »