On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 05:21:10AM -0700, Ringo Kamens wrote: > I have to say that the torcp doesn't seem at all unstable in the windows xp > home service pack one world. Despite reassurances, I still have doubts about > the true intentions of vidalia but it could be that my paranoia has gotten > the best of me. Please don't misunderstand: suspicions are good. If you find any bugs in the source, you ought to tell us about them. If you worry about 'true intentions', though, did you know that the Vidalia authors and the TorCP authors are the same people? (Unstability isn't the point; TorCP is unsupported code using an unsupported interface. Nobody is improving it; nobody is porting it; nobody is making it take advantages of improvements in Tor 0.1.1.x; nobody is translating the interface. Nostalgia and FUD can't save unsupported code; only support can.) > Look at it this way: > > 1. Implemented into tor without any previous notice We do stuff without notice all the time. We're just a bunch of overworked developers -- it's hard enough working on Tor full time; we don't have a marketing department to tell everybody what the next version will be about. Anyway, this isn't the dev list, and this isn't where development happens. Vidalia has been slated to replace TorCP for a long time. If you want to see what we're doing, lurk on the irc channel, or follow CVS. This *is* something I feel badly about. However, signal-to-noise ratio on this list is so incredibly low that a lot of the main contributers have stopped reading it regularly, thus making it an unsuitable venue for development chatter. > 2. The server browsing software on their site is called trac http://www.edgewall.com/trac/ . It seems to be BSD licensed. Is it doing something sinister? (Did you try clicking on the "Trac" link at the bottom of their pages? It takes you to that site.) > 3. There is an unexplained QT symbol in the about menu QT is a cross-platform GUI toolkit. http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt This is one of the big improvements of Vidalia over TorCP: because QT is cross-platform, Vidalia can run on OSX and Unix as well as on Windows. (Did you try googling for QT? That's the first link.) > 4. Either they changed this or I can't find it. It said created by and then > had a suspicious name like watchwear or something. Huh? > I will personally audit the source code for this to satisfy my paranoia and > I'll report back. Cool! If you notice any bugs while you're doing so, please report them as well. Since you are the single most prolific poster on the or-talk mailing list, it will be good to see you helping us out with the project. (If you have the time to audit the Tor source too, that would be greatly appreciated. We don't get enough external review.) yrs, -- Nick Mathewson
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