Re: [tor-talk] Setting up Tor on Ubuntu

[Simon Brereton <simon.brereton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 21 March 2012 07:20,  <tor324890@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I had problems with Vidalia seemingly randomly overwriting my tor rc file
> with its default settings, so I stopped using it. Now, I just run the tor
> proxy itself.
>
> I'd do what you originally intended: keep it simple, you want to learn tor
> so just run tor alone for now. Get back to the position you were at when you
> just had tor, no Vidalia, and you've confirmed it's running with nmap. By
> default it'll run on port 9050 - nmap should confirm that, so you should set
> your proxy setting in your browser to localhost:9050. Set your browser to
> manual proxy for now, just to eliminate 'system proxy' from the equation.

Okay, the error was in front of the keyboard.  When using the proxy
settings in Chrome (which uses the system proxy), I was following the
same protocol as in Firefox - and entering the details in http and
selecting to use for all protocols.  The answer was to enter for the
socks option only.  Then it works in Chrome.

Sadly, that has the consequence that when I fire up Firefox, Firefox
also uses that proxy - whether proxying in Firefox is enabled or not.
That's bad.  Loathe as I am to have a third browser installed, it
looks like I might have to use the TBB for secure browsing instead of
Chromium (which had been my plan.  Firefox is altogether safer and
easier to configure for a higher-level of safety without going torshit
crazy (and it's also useful to have a browser that stores some
cookies).

So now I have the following questions.

1)  Can I use the TBB even though I have tor installed and running successfully?
2)  Is there a danger in having tor running even when I'm not using it?
3)  I was reading up on exit-point safety and apologies to the people
who spent time documenting it, but I didn't understand that well at
all.  I'm a native speaker and technically literate, so I'm concerned
other people might not understand it either.
4)  Do I need privoxy or obfusproxy?

Thanks.



> When tor started up, its log file should have said something about
> confirming that it's running. 'telnet localhost 9050' should leave you with
> a blank line waiting for input (IIRC). That confirms that something is
> listening on port 9050.
>
> Visit a web page in your browser. There's a test page that you can visit
> which detects and shows you whether your browser is using tor. I can't
> remember what page it is, but a simple search for it should tell you (search
> for it before you do all this, otherwise you might not be able to do a web
> search for it!).


It's https://check.torproject.org - which I referenced in my original.
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