Re: Warnings on the download page

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 07:17:09PM -0600, Mike Perry wrote:
> > The current simplest advice I can give people is to remove all plugins:
> > http://tor.eff.org/download.html.en#Warning
> > Do you have any suggestions on safe ways to back off from that?
> 
> I have a couple more points - the second browser phrase should link to
> http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/firefox_portable because
> otherwise it's not really easy to have a second firefox installed.

I hear from people on OS X who use Firefox for safe stuff and Safari
or something else for non-safe stuff. They seem happy enough.

I'm not comfortable recommending portable firefox yet, due to a problem
that Steven Murdoch found a while ago: when firefox starts up, it hunts
around on your hard drive to see if there are any plugins, and then it
enables those. I think there are some ways to disable this behavior,
but it's not disabled by default... so it's not so easy as just adding
a link. :(

Also, isn't Portable Firefox Windows-only? Or am I confused?

> I think we should also mention that we do scan the exits to try to
> verify they are behaving well, but we may miss some.

How often are you doing this scanning at this point?

Speaking of which, a frequently asked question that isn't answered on
the FAQ is: "I'm pretty sure my exit node is screwing with me. How do
I figure out which exit node it is?" My answers so far have been
  - Run at loglevel info and go look through all the stuff that
    makes no sense to you. Not so easy.
  - Use Vidalia's Network Map window and watch which circuit your
    stream is connecting to. Easy -- if you use Vidalia.
  - Connect to the control port manually and ask for stream and
    circuit events and then let it scroll. When something goes
    wrong, look at the output and piece it back together.

Any ideas on a more foolproof approach? :)

--Roger