vidalia

An updated Tor Browser Bundle is released to address the Firefox 3.0.7 security issues. It includes:

• Update Firefox to 3.0.8
• Add Italian language bundles
• Update Torbutton to 1.2.1
• Update Vidalia to 0.1.12

This updated TBB can be downloaded from https://www.torproject.org/easy-download as the "zero install bundle".

One of the most requested upgrades to Vidalia is a better map of the world. We looked into a few different technologies and decided on KDE's Marble interface. Marble enables an accurate mapping of nodes according to their geolocation, allows for future enhancements such as "click a country to start or end your Tor circuit", and plugins for extra data views. This also gives us the ability to use Qt's Webkit browser to display custom information about nodes, circuits, or anything else in a pop-up window. An anonymous funder covered the costs involved in developing this feature. We thank them for their support. read more »

Tor Browser Bundle 1.1.9 is released.

It includes the following changes:

Update Tor to 0.2.1.12-alpha
Update Firefox to 3.0.6
Update Vidalia to 0.1.11

It's available at https://www.torproject.org/torbrowser/

Design
We continued enhancements to the Chinese and Russian Tor website translations. We also have a second Chinese translator for the website now, so hopefully we will get more prompt translations there. Our Farsi translation from this summer is slowly becoming obsolete; we should solve that at some point.

We added a new "30 second summary" web page for Tor:
https://www.torproject.org/30seconds
and a new "easy download" page since the original is so complex:
https://www.torproject.org/easy-download

In the upcoming Vidalia 0.2.0 development release:
- Support changing UI languages without having to restart Vidalia.
- Updated Czech, Polish, Romanian and Turkish translations.

In the upcoming Vidalia 0.1.10 stable release:
- Add a prettier dialog for prompting people for their control port password that also includes a checkbox for whether the user wants Vidalia to remember the entered password, a Help button, and a Reset button (Windows only).
- Fix a crash bug that occurred when the user clicks 'Clear' in the message log toolbar followed by 'Save All'.
- Uncheck the Torbutton options by default in the Windows bundle installer if Firefox is not installed.
- Add an Windows bundle installer page that warns the user that they should install Firefox, if it looks like they haven't already done so.

It looks like Australia is soon to be joining the ranks of countries with a nationwide filtering regime:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081016-net-filters-required-for-a...

Proposals
We finished the first iteration of our auto-updater spec:
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/updater/trunk/specs/thandy-spec.txt
We detail our current auto-updater progress below. read more »

Releases
Vidalia 0.1.9 (released September 2) fixes a big pile of bugs and inconveniences in the earlier releases. This new release marks the first "stable" release of Vidalia, in that we have now branched into a stable (0.1.x) branch and a development (0.2.x) branch.
http://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.1.9/CHANG...

Tor 0.2.0.31 (released September 3) addresses two potential anonymity issues, starts to fix a big bug we're seeing where in rare cases traffic from one Tor stream gets mixed into another stream, and fixes a variety of smaller issues.
http://archives.seul.org/or/announce/Sep-2008/msg00000.html

Tor 0.2.1.6-alpha (released September 30) further improves performance and robustness of hidden services, starts work on supporting per-country relay selection, and fixes a variety of smaller issues.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Oct-2008/msg00093.html

Circumvention Enhancements
From the Vidalia 0.1.9 ChangeLog:
"Correct the location of the simplified Chinese help files so they will actually load again."

From the Tor 0.2.1.6-alpha ChangeLog:
"Start work to allow node restrictions to include country codes. The syntax to exclude nodes in a country with country code XX is "ExcludeNodes {XX}". Patch from Robert Hogan. It still needs some refinement to decide what config options should take priority if you ask to both use a particular node and exclude it."
This feature should allow users in China to specify that they don't want to enter (and/or exit) in China, which in theory could provide stronger security for them.

From the Tor 0.2.1.6-alpha ChangeLog:
"Allow ports 465 and 587 in the default exit policy again. We had rejected them in 0.1.0.15, because back in 2005 they were commonly misconfigured and ended up as spam targets. We hear they are better locked down these days." read more »

Releases:

Torbutton 1.2.0rc5 (released July 6) provides improved addon compatibility, better preservation of Firefox preferences that we touch, fixing issues with Tor toggle breaking for some option combos, and an improved 'Restore Defaults' button. This version also features Firefox 3 cookie jar support, and support for storing cookie jars in memory.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jul-2008/msg00026.html

Vidalia 0.1.6 (released July 8) fixes a bug introduced in 0.1.3 that could cause excessive CPU usage or crashing on some platforms; continues to prepare Vidalia's strings for easier translation; adds a Romanian GUI and installer translation; and updated the Farsi, Finnish, French, German, and Swedish translations.
http://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.1.6/CHANG...

Tor 0.2.0.29-rc (released July 8) fixes two big bugs with using bridges, fixes more hidden-service performance bugs, and fixes a bunch of smaller bugs.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jul-2008/msg00038.html

Torbutton 1.2.0rc6 (released July 12) features fixes for a nasty history loss bug, an exception during Tor toggle, javascript being disabled in some tabs, better pref handling, and more.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jul-2008/msg00049.html

Tor 0.2.0.30 (released July 15) is the first stable release of the 0.2.0.x branch. The previous stable branch (0.1.2.x) went stable in April of 2007. We are still waiting for Torbutton and Vidalia to stabilize before announcing the Windows and OS X packages on the or-announce announcements
list. We expect to do that in August.

Tor Browser Bundle 1.1.1 (released July 20) updates Vidalia to release 0.1.6, updates Pidgin Portable to 2.4.3, updates Pidgin OTR plugin to 3.2, updates Tor to 0.2.1.2-alpha, updates Torbutton to 1.2.0rc6, and sets TZ=UTC environment variable in RelativeLink (needed by Torbutton).
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/torbrowser/trunk/README read more »

We are currently sponsoring a design contest to create a new logo for Vidalia. The winner of the contest will receive a $250 USD cash prize. The firm deadline for contest submissions is August 22, 2008.

The logo will be used in the Vidalia software and related installers, on the website, and on t-shirts. Designers are free to choose any fonts, color combinations, and symbol options you like (no onions, though, please). The logo must include a symbolic component that is recognizable by itself without the name "Vidalia" next to it. See the contest page for more details. If you have further questions, please email contest@vidalia-project.net or stop by #vidalia on irc.oftc.net.

Here's the overall timeline for the contest:

• August 15 – August 22: Entries may be submitted at the Worth1000 contest page.
• August 23 – August 24: Everyone is welcome to review the submissions received and vote on their favorite design. Even if you didn't submit anything, you can still vote!

• August 25 – August 31: The final winner will be announced by August 31 at the latest.

Late entries will not be eligible for the cash prize, so be sure to get your
submission in by August 22!

I've noticed a few comments about a Chinese anti-virus program, RISING, reporting that Vidalia.exe and Privoxy.exe are infected with Trojan.PSW.Win32.Undef.adp. In both cases, I suspect that RISING is reporting false positives. These executables as packaged and available on the Tor download page are not infected.

I've looked at the MD5 and SHA-1 sums of these programs as included in the Vidalia bundle and they match what the source packages produce as executables. The privoxy.exe included in the bundles is the exact same one as found at the Sourceforge Privoxy Download Page.

The Vidalia.exe is the same as the one included in the Vidalia Download Page.

Feel free to confirm this is true for you. Better yet, let us know if these individual packages (Vidalia.exe from Vidalia and Privoxy.exe from Sourceforge) also show up as infected.

Torbutton 1.2.0rc1 (released June 1), the first release candidate for the next stable series of the security-enhanced Torbutton Firefox extension, features functional support for Firefox 3. However, this support has not been extensively tested. In particular, timezone masking does not work at all. The workaround is to manually set the environment variable 'TZ' to 'UTC' before starting Firefox. This works on both Linux and Windows:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00044.html

Tor 0.2.0.27-rc (released June 3) adds a few features we left out of the earlier release candidates. In particular, we now include an IP-to-country GeoIP database, so controllers can easily look up what country a given relay is in, and so bridge relays can give us some sanitized summaries about which countries are making use of bridges. (See proposal 126-geoip-fetching.txt for details.)
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00055.html

Torbutton 1.2.0rc2 (released June 8) features a fix for an annoying bug on MacOS, and adds much clamored for options to start Firefox in a specific Tor state:
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00103.html

Tor 0.2.0.28-rc (released June 13) fixes an anonymity-related bug, fixes a hidden-service performance bug, and fixes a bunch of smaller bugs.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00165.html

Tor 0.2.1.1-alpha (released June 13) fixes a lot of memory fragmentation problems that were making the Tor process bloat especially on Linux; makes our TLS handshake blend in better; sends "bootstrap phase" status events to the controller, so it can keep the user informed of progress (and problems) fetching directory information and establishing circuits; and adds a variety of smaller features. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Jun-2008/msg00185.html

Vidalia 0.1.4 (released June 13) adds a bootstrap progress bar, UPnP support, a new set of freely licensed GUI icons, and fixes a few bugs. read more »

Tor 0.2.0.26-rc (released May 13) fixes a major security vulnerability caused by a bug in Debian's OpenSSL packages. All users running any 0.2.0.x version should upgrade, whether they're running Debian or not.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/May-2008/msg00048.html

Vidalia 0.1.3 (released May 25) adds a hidden service configuration UI designed and implemented by Domenik Bork, as well as a few other bugfixes.
http://trac.vidalia-project.net/browser/vidalia/tags/vidalia-0.1.3/CHANG...

The Tor Browser Bundle 1.0.2 (released May 3) and 1.0.3 (released May 16) include upgraded versions of Tor, Vidalia, Torbutton, and Firefox.

We added three new part-time developers in May. We hired Matt Edman as a part-time employee at the beginning of May, to work on Vidalia maintenance, bugfixes, and new features. We also are funding Karsten Loesing to work on making hidden service rendezvous and interaction faster, and Peter Palfrader to work on lowering the overhead of directory requests, especially during bootstrap, which should directly improve the experience for Tor users on modems or cell phones.

Google has agreed to give us some funding to work on auto-update for Windows. Our plan is for Vidalia to look at the majority-signed network status consensus to decide when to update and to what version (Tor already lists what versions are considered safe, in each network status document). We should actually do the update via Tor if possible, for additional privacy, and we need to make sure to check package signatures to ensure package validity. Last, we need to give the user an interface for these updates, including letting her opt to migrate from one major Tor version to the next.

We continued enhancements to the Chinese and Russian Tor website translations. Vidalia also added a Turkish translation.

From the Vidalia 0.1.3 ChangeLog: read more »