Re: Annoying loop situation

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 10:33:07PM +0100, Bob Williams wrote:
> > You probably want to disable torbutton and configure your non-tor proxy.
> >  Then when you click to enable torbutton, your tor settings are enabled.
> >  When you disable torbutton, your privoxy configuration is still intact.
> 
> Well, that's the odd thing. I start with torbutton disabled (red message on 
> the Firefox status bar). I then go to Firefox > Edit > Preferences > Network > 
> Settings and select Manual Proxy Configuration. (I notice that it tells me to 
> Disable Torbutton to change these settings, but it's already disabled). I 
> select 127.0.0.1 port 8118 for http and ssl, and port 9050 for socks. When I 
> click OK, Torbutton becomes enabled :(

That's because Torbutton watches your proxy settings and tries to make
sure that whatever status it's displaying matches your current proxy
settings.

That is, if anything ever changes your proxy settings so your Firefox
is now configured to use the settings that Torbutton would use when you
click 'enable', then Torbutton will change status to show you that your
proxy settings are pointing to Tor.

It looks like you're using Torbutton to point to Privoxy, but you're
using Privoxy directly rather than pointing it into Tor. That's fine
(as long as you know what you're doing), but Torbutton can't tell the
difference.

Hm. Back in the day when Torbutton was just a proxy toggler, it made a lot
of sense to have Torbutton update its status to reflect what your proxy
settings 'really' are. But now that Torbutton does all sorts of other
application-level things, it is plausible that you might want to have
your proxy settings set up in a way that looks identical to Tor, yet you
don't want the other application-level protections that Torbutton adds.

But then, isn't this a really special case? For example, if you run your
Privoxy on a different port, then you won't confuse Torbutton.

--Roger