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Re: LiveCD / USB for testing



Thanks for the comments. I've made some re-organization changes and more 
finishing touches (like better eye-candy), some related to your comments. I 
have a new page but the referenced CDs are not available yet.

http://fwks5nwum4hpjnin.onion/torkit.html

See comments below:

On Wednesday 16 May 2007, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> - The configuration descriptions are great. They let me actually decide

I've made the SVN available via HTTP and linked the configuration descriptions 
to the appropriate files.

> - You should probably pick a better name than 'torcd', long-term.
>   Everybody seems to want to pick that name for their Tor livecd, and
>   things are already confusing enough. :) As an example, blindcoder
>   changed his torcd project to "Rockate", a pun on Rock linux and (I
>   assume) the translation of Tor as a German word.

:) Surely! There are a couple of places that it is labeled "Tor Kit", a 
toolkit for Tor based anonymity. I finished this and replaced all references 
of torcd (and torusb) to "Tor Kit". I even branded the UI as such.

> - Setting up Tor with its DirPort enabled should be fine if you're
>   using Tor 0.1.2.13 or later. This version of Tor is pretty good about
>   not advertising its DirPort until it thinks it has enough bandwidth
>   to offer.

Change made.

> - Speaking of which, your descriptions of applications don't say which
>   versions you're including. Is it Firefox 0.9 or 2.0 or what? :)

Yeah, I should've done that. Since this is based on Gentoo, the versions are 
those deemed by Gentoo devs as "stable", with some rare exceptions including 
the main apps such as Tor, Privoxy, TorK, Vidalia, etc. I am thinking of 
addressing this way:

1. Generation of the CD puts a manifest of all packages and versions 
at /usr/share/packages.txt . This is complete and will be available when I 
post the next CDs (hopefully today or tomorrow).

2. Write a script to update the posted version of torkit.html with the version 
numbers of the apps that are referenced (not the entire set). I'll work on 
this after the CDs are posted.

It would be nice to update the torkit.html on the CD but due to the catalyst 
build tool there is not a convient way to do this. I may patch catalyst.

> - As for the UDP question, my instinct is towards dropping unexpected
>   UDP packets. Is your goal to provide an easy anonymizing experience for
>   people who otherwise don't much know what they're doing? Or to provide
>   a "power livecd" for people who want their applications even when they
>   show up at a foreign computer? I guess these are quite different goals,
>   and you'll go mad if you try to achieve both at once.

The version I'm working on now blocks UDP. I see no compelling reason yet to 
enable it. If there is an app that needs it I will open specific ports.

I am aiming towards people who know how to use the apps, know that anonymity 
is a concern, but aren't interested in tweaking the settings, network filter, 
etc. I reflected this in the updated torkit.html document.

Thanks for the comments and the software.

-- 
Pat Double, pat@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Ye must be born again." - John 3:7

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