On 07/03/2014 04:16 PM, Seth David Schoen wrote:
The Doctor writes:
On 07/02/2014 04:18 PM, Helder Ribeiro wrote:
Apps like Pocket (http://getpocket.com/) work as a "read it later"
queue, downloading things for offline reading. While you're reading
an offline article, you can also follow links and click to add them
to your queue. They'll be fetched when you're online so you can
read them later.
I've been using the Firefox extension called Scrapbook
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook/) for this
for a while now. I've done some experiments with it (packet sniffing
at the firewall and on the machine in question), and from observation
it seems sufficiently proxy-compliant that it routes all traffic in
question through Tor when it downloads and stores a local copy of a
page. Secondary opinions are, of course, welcome and encouraged.
That's great, but in the context of this thread I would want to imagine
a future-generation version that does a much better job of hiding who
is downloading which pages -- by high-latency mixing, like an
anonymous remailer chain.
One can imagine a browser extension that introduced random delay at each
step of getting a page. Webservers tend to drop very slow clients, as
defense against slow-loris DoS, so the extension would need to learn the
limits for each site.
The existing Tor network can't directly support this use case very
well, except by acting as a transport.
The ability to switch circuits during the process of getting a page
would help greatly.
Right now, people who are using toolks like Pocket or Scrapbook over Tor
_aren't_ really getting the privacy benefits that in principle their
not-needing-to-read-it-right-this-second could be offering. That is,
a global-enough adversary can sometimes notice that person X has just
downloaded item Y for offline reading. There's no reason that the
adversary has to be able to do that.