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

[Matthew Finkel <matthew.finkel@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 02:54:57PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 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.
> 

I thought that was where I originally heard it, too. Alas, it was not
mentioned during that talk, nor was it mentioned during 23c3 or Internet
Days. I wonder if anyone else knows what I'm talking about.

> > 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
> 

Number 10 is quite relevant for this (The 23c3 talk also describes the
content of this paper, for those who do not want to read).

> > 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.

That would be sad if that is the case. I saw Tom just posted some info
on Libtech. Some interesting choices [0]:

-------------SNIP-----------------------
Some other random stats for the curious.

Tor v0.2.3.25 (git-17c24b3118224d65)
Vidalia 0.2.21 (QT 4.8.1)

# Configured for speed
ExcludeSingleHopRelays 0
EnforceDistinctSubnets 0
AllowSingleHopCircuits 1

# Exclude countries that might have blocks
ExcludeExitNodes {dk},{ie},{gb},{nl},{be},{it},{cn},{ir},{fi},{no}

#Selected user prefs
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://6kkgg7nth3sbuuwd.onion";);
user_pref("general.useragent.override", "PB0.6b Mozilla/5.0 (Windows
NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:23.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/23.0");
--------------------------SNIP------------------------


- Matt


[0]
https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/2013-August/010765.html
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