phobos's blog

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 »

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.