Re: [tor-talk] So what about Pirate Browser?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 07:29:39PM +0000, Matthew Finkel wrote:
> The one thing I always think about when I hear about the comparison of
> censorship circumvention vs. anonymity[0] is something I once heard (maybe
> from Jake or Roger, I apologies for not having a citation),

Jake and I tried to emphasize the "censorship implies surveillance"
meme in our 28c3 talk.

> Assuming I recall the basis of the quote correctly, this is an extremely
> important idea that must be understood when dealing with censorship.
> Going back to the PirateBrowser, if they are stripping out all of the
> fantastic work Mike has done to preserve a users Anonymity (and the
> packaging Erinn has done) and they replace it with Portable Firefox, I
> don't think it can reach the full potential of "No more censorship!"
> that they proclaim.

Right. I expect they're going to have a real challenge teaching
their users about what they're getting and what they're not getting. I
appreciate the experiment and want to see how it goes -- but that said,
we should keep an eye out for sentences that start with "And since you're
using Tor", since a downside for the Tor world could be that they start
mis-educating other Tor users.

As an aside, we already experience this mis-education in the context
of for-profit VPN companies, where they compete to see who can write
"100% guaranteed bulletproof encryption" in the blinkiest font on their
websites, whereas Tor instead works to explain that some parts of the
protocol provide encryption and others don't:
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/articles/circumvention-features.html#7

> However, I do think it is worth it to look at what
> magic they use in Iran and North Korea. Is it more than using Tor and a
> hidden service?

I assume they just assume that Tor magically gets around all censorship,
and haven't explored any further than that. Happy to be shown wrong.

--Roger

-- 
tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
To unsusbscribe or change other settings go to
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk