[tor-talk] The Tor-BSD Diversity Project

[grarpamp <grarpamp@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Apple wrote:
> I am not particularly enlightened but I was under the impression that
> people do not use BSD for a reason.

The history of the market is all... Microsoft vs. opensource unix (one
flavor of which was chilled through the 90's by it's parents). Today you
can freely choose what you want and contribute to make it what you
want. Build whatever comp charts you like but there's little difference
between the outward capabilities of FreeBSD and Linux. Another 5-10
years and even that will narrow to just TMTOWTDI, userbases, and
philosophies, of which this partly represent one of them...

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/bsdl-gpl/article.html
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

> It's 2015 and FreeBSD is still lacking basic security mechanisms such as
> ASLR.

http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-01-2015-03.html#Address-Space-Layout-Randomization-(ASLR)
https://wiki.freebsd.org/AddressSpaceLayoutRandomization
http://www.bsdcan.org/2014/schedule/events/452.en.html
https://wiki.freebsd.org/201409DevSummit/ASLR

> It also seems to me that the community's ideological licencing crusade
> They condemn anything GPL

GPLers are no different.

> BSD rewriting GPL projects

GPL could have rewritten BSD parts too, but they evaluate BSD work
and decide to import/keep various parts. That's a real honor to BSD,
especially when there's no license forcing them to do it.

GPL could rewrite the BSD licensed Tor too but they don't ;)

> ksh instead of bash

It's all there, go install it.

> virtual box instead of xen ... bhyve

http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2014-10-2014-12.html#FreeBSD-Xen
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2015-01-2015-03.html#bhyve

> OpenBSD ... spend all their time auditing the base system
> you install a buggy or untrusted application then

That's want they want to do, so they do it, and they have a good product
in that area, some say perhaps the best among any current OS (not
that any OS are being independantly audited to test that).

If you can't trust your base, then all your base belong to...

> I like the idea of diversifying the Tor infrastructure, defence in depth
> and all that but I feel like it would be nice to also have some clear
> arguments for why another OS should be adopted - not just it exists
> and it's not Linux.

If it requires three cracks to crack three different OS+app combos,
then that's part the reason.

The other part is that Tor and TBB/FF should run on whatever people run
as their OS. That's primarily Win, Linux, BSD. Even on Android and Apple
where not platform prohibitive. You could even make a ChromiumBB if
you wanted to.

> an idea: maybe talk to forums.freebsd.org / www.freebsdforums.org
> operators about making their sites available also to tor users as well?

If you have access issues, yes, please do.


Back on subject, and in case anyone missed it, here's the project:
https://torbsd.github.io/
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