Hello *, Nathan and I have been working on making a viable, secure and usable port of Tor to the Android platform. There have been a few attempts at getting Tor or Tor like software (onion coffee, etc) to run on Android. The most notable was probably Adam Langley's initial attempts. For quite sometime, Nathan and I tried a few different approaches. Finally, we stumbled upon a method for calling arbitrary binaries that are stored as assets in a package. Nathan wrote a little about this method here: http://openideals.com/2009/10/22/orbot-proxy/ We spent most of today working on an Orbot build document: https://tor-svn.freehaven.net/svn/projects/android/trunk/Orbot/BUILD The BUILD document starts a user off without any Android tools on their system. By the end of the tutorial, you'll have a working, signed Orbot package. We will endevor to keep this document up to date. Orbot provides a simple way to run the C reference implementation of Tor. This means that we can have hidden services and all of the rest of the Tor client/server/bridge functionality on Android. I expect that hidden services will become popular if someone ports TorChat to Android. Tor itself exposes the usual SOCKS proxy and Orbot extends this by also offering an HTTP proxy. Part of the code that powers the HTTP proxy is a powered by a fork of jsocks. We've named it asocks (Android SOCKS) and put it in subversion: https://tor-svn.freehaven.net/svn/projects/android/trunk/asocks/ The UI for Orbot really needs a lot of work. It will require a lot of polish. Currently, it does do very basic controlling of Tor; it's mostly by brute force and doesn't use anything fancy with the control port. The next step will be to create a second application that actually uses Tor. It will likely be a web browser that specifically utilizes Tor for everything. This will be similar in scope to what Conell did for TorProxy with his Shadow browser: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/dtg/android/tor/ It is likely that we'll replace TorProxy in the market after we're pretty sure that we're on the right path. If you'd like to try a build of Orbot, I've put up an early alpha build: http://freehaven.net/~ioerror/Orbot-signed-alpha-24-10-2009.apk If you have an android phone, you can scan this QR code to download and install the package: http://freehaven.net/~ioerror/orbot.png This is our first alpha release and we'd love some feedback... Best, Jacob
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