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The Daily Dot has a story about a browser vendor who wants to package Tor as part of its private browsing mode. From the article:
Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.
“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”
The author elaborates:
The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
The story appears to have gleaned most of its information from a tor-dev mailing list post. An interesting reply from Tor developer Mike Perry explains how Tor can be modified so that the network can handle the extra load.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 01 2014, @07:42PM
Not a bad solution, IF you're insisting on using the system on your already existing host system. Which in general is an unnecessary risk to take in 99% of cases.
T(A)ILS uses many more methods to ensure that things aren't leaking, down to including a transparent proxy with iptables that enforces ALL TCP traffic goes through Tor, and blocks UDP (measures are taken such that DNS still can work). And it doesn't touch your hard drive unless you go out of your way to tell it to.
Why again are we suggesting people use browser only solutions to ensuring their connection to a darknet is secure? It does make for some amusing news stories about dumb criminals, but really, it's worth avoiding where possible.
(Score: 1) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday October 01 2014, @09:01PM
Not a bad solution, IF you're insisting on using the system on your already existing host system. Which in general is an unnecessary risk to take in 99% of cases
That's not the point.
Most people assume Tor is used by those who want to buy drugs or find kiddie porn, by whistleblowers or by dissidents in dicatorships. But that's not my case: I live in a (pseudo-)democracy, and I use Tor, along with Ghostery, Random Agent Spoofer, Noscript and the others, to make it harder for Google, national spying agencies and other snooping sumbitches to track the sites I visit on the internet, profile me, and profit off of my browsing habits. I only visit a few sites on the darknet, most notably DuckDuckGo and SoylentNews - the former as a non-Google, non-Microsoft search engine that doesn't require going through an exit node, and the latter as a version of Slashdot that supports https.
As such, I don't care if it writes on my hard-disk, or if part of the traffic doesn't go through Tor all of the time. All I want is to make my browsing patterns confusing. I definitely don't need the full-blown Tor Browser paranoia for my usage: just a Tor proxy, a few add-ons, and sane habits on the internet.
In fact, there are times I *don't* want to go through Tor, typically to visit passworded http (not-s) sites: in this case, I trust the Tor exit node that'll proxy my traffic even less than I trust the usual corporate and state snoops.
Of course, if I was into drugs or whistleblowing, I most certainly would use Tor Browser in its default configuration (but with Javascript disabled) to do my browsing. But since I'm not, Tor Browser just gets in my way more than I can bear.
And it doesn't touch your hard drive unless you go out of your way to tell it to.
Not true: no matter what you do, again, it won't let you save passwords on the hard drive - with or without a master password. I do believe it is a bug, but it's been there for such a long time, I wonder if it's not by design after all. Tor Browser is annoying in many ways, but I can live with the annoyances. But the password saving bug is one annoyance too many for me.
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 08 2014, @02:49AM
Not true: no matter what you do, again, it won't let you save passwords on the hard drive - with or without a master password. I do believe it is a bug, but it's been there for such a long time, I wonder if it's not by design after all.
If it's not by design, it's a very good bug to have. If you're going for less paranoia, you can definitely configure on your own at your own risk, but there's no good reason that the Tor Browser would have to allow password saving by default. Generally speaking, a lot of Tor user deobfuscation has centered around driveby malware, and stealing the saved passwords would go a long way to putting together an identity by any particularly determined attacker, especially state sponsored. I'm curious as to how it is stopped though; I'd have a look in about:config.