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Re: Tor on the Nokia N900 (Mobile Tor stuff)



7v5w7go9ub0o wrote:
> On 02/18/10 20:07, Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
>> The performance of Tor is similar to any other Tor client - this is our
>> reference C implementation running on the N900.
>>
>> With that said - You may want to hold out and get an Android phone.
>> We're looking to do a release of Tor on Android next week. We have some
>> very promising alphas and it's quite exciting!
> 
> Please correct me if I'm wrong, but am a little surprised at the 
> interest in TOR on Android  - Android seems a closed, phone-home "cloud" 
> computer with little/no regard for privacy or anonymity. I'd always 
> wonder about a nice little log somewhere on my phone and/or in the "cloud".
> 

I think that Android offers us a new possibility for telephones. I also
like the N900 but I feel that Nokia often screws their user community.
It's good to have options and so the more Tor on the more devices, the
better.

You may be interested in hearing about the Guardian project:
http://openideals.com/guardian/

Additionally, you may also be interested in Noisedroid:
https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Noisedroid

Or perhaps the more well known cyanogen firmware:
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/

All of those offer a possibility for an Android system built entirely
from Free Software pieces. The big missing piece is the baseband and
when last I checked there was not a single smart phone with a free
baseband firmware. Harald Welte is currently working on on solving this
problem for the Calypso chipset:
http://laforge.gnumonks.org/weblog/2010/02/19/#20100219-announcing_osmocom_bb

The future looks nice all around. Having Tor on as many of these devices
will provide many people with options beyond what we can imagine.

> OTOH, IIUC, The N900 can be configured as a traditional lap/desktop. 
> (Arguably, one may want to hold out for an entirely open-source meego 
> N900 with the new Intel chip)
> 

The same can be said about almost any phone software. You can hack it
and the barrier for entry is really the only sticking point.

The N900 and Android aren't too terribly different from a consumer
standpoint. If you're running the stock firmware from your phone
provider, you're beholden to their backdoors or whatever crazy bugs they
haven't patched. In any case, Tor provides you with a nice anonymity
solution. It is far from perfect (baseband security issues, etc) but
it's certainly better than nothing.

Having Tor in the Android Market and having Tor in the Maemo repository
allows people to choose. We'll also hopefully have Tor on Windows Mobile
in the future but I can't seem to find anyone who wants to Bell The Cat. :-)

Best,
Jake

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