tor browser bundle

Thanks to Rob at Freedom House for putting together some videos about how to get, install, and use Tor, Tor Browser Bundle, and Bridges.

• Installing and Using Tor, http://tinyvid.tv/show/3lejztnthk2tm
• Installing and Using the Tor Browser Bundle, http://tinyvid.tv/show/b0e2hzylie8r
• Installing and Using Bridges with Tor, http://tinyvid.tv/show/3uiwckrlqynqv

Freedom House has put together other videos on various tools to use to stay secure online at, http://www.youtube.com/freedom4internet.

Check them out and leave constructive feedback. I'm sure Rob will appreciate help with translating these videos as well.

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.9 is released today. It updates Firefox and Pidgin Instant Messaging client to address the security issues in the older versions, and includes the latest and greatest Vidalia.

TBB can be downloaded from https://www.torproject.org/torbrowser.

The details of the changes are:

• update Vidalia to 0.2.4
• update Qt to 4.5.2
• update Pidgin to 2.6.2
• update Firefox to 3.0.14

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 »

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 Browser Bundle 1.2.3 was released on July 8, 2009. It contains the following changes:

• Update Vidalia to 0.1.14
• Update Tor to 0.2.1.17-rc
• Update Pidgin to 2.5.8

TBB 1.2.3 was replaced by 1.2.4 on July 11, 2009 to include:

• Include libeay32.dll from OpenSSL 0.9.8k to make QT happy
• Update Vidalia to 0.1.15

TBB 1.2.4 is available at https://torproject.org/torbrowser.

Tor Browser Bundle 1.2.2 is now available. The only change is an update to Pidgin to version 2.5.7. The Pidgin changelog has more information.