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[vidalia-svn] r1803: Rename the poster abstract and add the real poster files and (in misc/soups07-poster: . poster.key poster.key/Contents poster.key/thumbs)
Author: edmanm
Date: 2007-07-15 16:50:54 -0400 (Sun, 15 Jul 2007)
New Revision: 1803
Added:
misc/soups07-poster/abstract.bib
misc/soups07-poster/abstract.pdf
misc/soups07-poster/abstract.tex
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/.typeAttributes.dict
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/Contents/
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/Contents/PkgInfo
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/control-panel.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/i18n.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/index.apxl.gz
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/network-map.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/osx-installer.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/server-page-1.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/server-page-3.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-0.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-10.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-11.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-12.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-13.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-14.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-15.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-16.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-17.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-18.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/mt0-9.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/thumbs/st0.tiff
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/tray-off-mac.pdf
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/tray-on-mac.pdf
misc/soups07-poster/poster.key/tray-win32.pdf
misc/soups07-poster/poster.pdf
Removed:
misc/soups07-poster/vidalia-poster.bib
misc/soups07-poster/vidalia-poster.pdf
misc/soups07-poster/vidalia-poster.tex
Modified:
misc/soups07-poster/Makefile
Log:
Rename the poster abstract and add the real poster files and pdf.
Modified: misc/soups07-poster/Makefile
===================================================================
--- misc/soups07-poster/Makefile 2007-07-14 04:58:05 UTC (rev 1802)
+++ misc/soups07-poster/Makefile 2007-07-15 20:50:54 UTC (rev 1803)
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
-vidalia-poster.pdf: vidalia-poster.tex
- pdflatex vidalia-poster.tex
- bibtex vidalia-poster
- pdflatex vidalia-poster.tex
- pdflatex vidalia-poster.tex
+abstract.pdf: abstract.tex
+ pdflatex abstract.tex
+ bibtex abstract
+ pdflatex abstract.tex
+ pdflatex abstract.tex
Copied: misc/soups07-poster/abstract.bib (from rev 1777, misc/soups07-poster/vidalia-poster.bib)
===================================================================
--- misc/soups07-poster/abstract.bib (rev 0)
+++ misc/soups07-poster/abstract.bib 2007-07-15 20:50:54 UTC (rev 1803)
@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+@inproceedings{tor-design,
+ title = {Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router},
+ author = {Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson and Paul Syverson},
+ booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th USENIX Security Symposium},
+ year = {2004},
+ month = {August},
+}
+
+@misc{qt,
+ title = {Qt {G}{U}{I} Toolkit},
+ author = {Trolltech},
+ note = "\texttt{http://www.trolltech.com/products/qt/}";,
+}
+
Added: misc/soups07-poster/abstract.pdf
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Copied: misc/soups07-poster/abstract.tex (from rev 1780, misc/soups07-poster/vidalia-poster.tex)
===================================================================
--- misc/soups07-poster/abstract.tex (rev 0)
+++ misc/soups07-poster/abstract.tex 2007-07-15 20:50:54 UTC (rev 1803)
@@ -0,0 +1,244 @@
+\documentclass{sig-alternate}
+
+% Modify the copyright block according to
+% http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/soups/2007/authors.html
+\permission{Copyright is held by the author/owner. Permission to make digital
+or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is
+granted without fee.}
+\conferenceinfo{Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS)}{July 18-20,
+2007, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.}
+\CopyrightYear{}
+\copyrightetc{}
+
+\title{Vidalia: Towards a Usable Tor GUI}
+
+\numberofauthors{2}
+\author{
+\alignauthor
+ Matthew Edman\\
+ \affaddr{The Vidalia Project}\\
+ \email{edmanm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}
+\alignauthor
+ Justin Hipple\\
+ \affaddr{The Vidalia Project}\\
+ \email{hipplej@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx}
+}
+
+\begin{document}
+\maketitle
+
+\begin{abstract}
+
+Tor is a popular tool for online anonymity that currently does not have a
+standard graphical user interface. We present Vidalia, an open source,
+cross-platform GUI for Tor. We discuss some of the design decisions we have
+made in Vidalia, as well as what we have found users expect in a Tor GUI.
+
+\end{abstract}
+
+\section{Introduction}
+\label{sec:intro}
+
+Tor~\cite{tor-design} is a system designed to allow users to anonymously
+communicate on the Internet, such as browsing the Web or chatting on IRC. The
+Tor software itself usually runs in the background as a daemon process on the
+user's computer and does not have a user interface beyond its log files.
+
+Vidalia was initially developed for a Tor GUI design competition in 2006, and
+is intended to provide a simple, easy-to-use interface for Tor. We wanted to
+create an interface that simplifies the process of setting up and managing
+Tor, and gives interested users the ability to learn more about what their Tor
+process is doing and where their traffic is going.
+
+Vidalia has been publicly available under the GNU General Public License since
+March 2006. Based on download statistics, we estimate Vidalia currently has
+tens of thousands of users. Here we discuss some of the design decisions we
+have made in Vidalia and some lessons we learned during Vidalia's on-going
+development.
+
+
+\section{Vidalia}
+\label{sec:vidalia}
+
+The Tor software is highly portable and we felt that a viable Tor GUI must
+also support as many platforms as possible. We chose to develop Vidalia in C++
+using the Qt GUI toolkit~\cite{qt}, which enabled us to more easily build a
+cross-platform application that uses native interface widgets on many
+platforms and window managers, including Windows, Mac OS X, Gnome and KDE.
+
+Due to space limitations, we have omitted actual screenshots of Vidalia's
+interface. Instead, interested readers can find current screenshots on our
+website at\\ {\tt www.vidalia-project.net}.
+
+\subsection{Installation}
+
+To simplify installation and configuration of the applications most commonly
+used in conjunction with Tor, we provide a ``bundled'' installation package
+for Windows that includes Vidalia, Tor, Privoxy, and Torbutton pre-configured
+to work together. Privoxy is an HTTP proxy that can filter out potentially
+harmful HTML features, such as Javascript. Torbutton is a very simple
+Firefox extension that lets users quickly enable or disable their Web
+browser's use of Tor. We also provide a similar bundle for Mac OS X, but it
+does not currently include Torbutton.
+
+We have not yet had any requests for similar bundled installers on other
+platforms, likely because users of Linux or other Unix variants often appear
+to be more comfortable installing and configuring software packages.
+
+\subsection{Main Interface}
+
+Vidalia launches Tor as a background process and places an onion-shaped icon
+in the user's system tray or dock that changes color to indicate Tor's status.
+A green onion indicates Tor is running, a dark onion with a red `X' indicates
+Tor is not running, and red or yellow onions represent intermediate states. A
+tooltip is displayed if the user mouses over the tray icon and gives a text
+description of Tor's status. The user can click the icon to bring up a menu of
+additional actions, such as viewing the status of their anonymous connections.
+
+Windows users are accustomed to looking to their system tray for application
+icons or status indicators. We found the unobtrusive tray icon to be
+preferable to the large command prompt window that typically appears when Tor
+is run on Windows without Vidalia\footnote{Windows NT/2000/XP users can run
+Tor in the background as a Windows service, but properly configuring Tor as a
+service is often challenging for novice users.}.
+
+There were, however, several problems with relying on only a tray icon for the
+primary application interface. Windows tray icons are limited to only $16
+\times 16$ pixels and it was sometimes difficult for users to identify what
+Vidalia's tray icon indicated, or even that the icon is an onion. We also
+found users on platforms other than Windows were not accustomed to looking for
+an icon in their system's notification area and might not initially notice
+Vidalia was even running. Some window managers, such as Enlightenment, by
+default do not have {\it any} form of a system tray.
+
+We recently added a ``control panel'' dialog that appears when Vidalia is
+first run. The control panel contains links to other commonly accessed Vidalia
+features, much like the tray menu. The dialog also displays a larger onion
+icon to more clearly indicate Tor's status, along with a more detailed
+text description. On platforms that do have a system tray, the user
+can optionally start Vidalia with the control panel hidden.
+
+\subsection{Network Visualization}
+
+The primary interest of most users is in whether or not their application
+traffic is being anonymized through Tor, but we have found many users are also
+interested in {\it where} their traffic is going. To answer both questions, we
+added a dialog that displays the status of the user's anonymous connections
+and plots their paths on a map of the world. The network map also makes it
+clearer to users that Tor differs from a simple one-hop proxy, since they can
+see the multiple hops their traffic takes as it traverses the Tor network.
+
+%Showing users the exact servers that are used to transport their anonymous
+%connections has lead to some confusion. Tor chooses a small set of reliable
+%servers on the network, called {\it entry guards}, to use as the first hop of
+%a client's anonymous connections. Some users assume Tor chooses all hops in
+%their path uniformly randomly and become concerned when they see some entry
+%guards appearing in many of their circuits.
+
+A common feature request from users is the ability to customize their paths
+through the Tor network. For example, some users want to be able to route
+their traffic through only the highest-bandwidth Tor servers, or force their
+traffic to appear to originate from a specific country. Tor has a fairly
+complex algorithm for choosing paths through the network that attempts to
+balance anonymity, application performance, and network load. Consequently, we
+decided not to implement features that let users significantly alter Tor's
+path selection, due to the negative effects they can easily have on the user's
+anonymity and the Tor network.
+
+\subsection{Running a Server}
+
+The Tor network is composed of hundreds of servers run by volunteers around
+the world. We wanted to make it easy for users to contribute to the Tor
+network by simplifying the process of setting up a Tor server. Vidalia's
+control panel has a button labeled ``Setup Relaying'' that takes users to a
+dialog that helps them set up their own Tor server. Users can then simply
+click a checkbox labeled ``Relay traffic for the Tor network'' and Vidalia
+will configure Tor to act as a server using sensible defaults.
+
+Optionally, users can further define how their server should behave. Users can
+select the approximate speed of their own network connection and Vidalia will
+choose a reasonable bandwidth limit for their server. There is also a small
+set of checkboxes for common Internet services, such as ``Websites'' and
+``Instant Messaging'', that users can check or uncheck to allow or disallow
+access to those resources from their server. Vidalia will then set Tor's {\it
+exit policy} according to the checkboxes.
+
+%This approach to server configuration is easier to understand for users who
+%often confuse KBps and Kbps when setting their bandwidth limits and may not
+%even know what a ``port'' is, let alone what ports are used for common
+%Internet applications.
+
+\subsection{Message Log}
+
+Tor's own method of communicating with the user is via log messages, many of
+which may not make sense to the user. Unfortunately, we find the terse log
+messages to still be a ``necessary evil'' since they can provide the best
+information to developers when users ask for troubleshooting support on Tor's
+mailing list or IRC channel.
+
+Vidalia attempts to make dealing with Tor's logs a little more palpable for
+novice users by displaying log messages in a more user-friendly table that can
+be sorted, searched and filtered based on message severity. Important
+messages are highlighted depending on their severity, with critical {\it
+error} messages appearing in red and less important {\it warning} messages
+appearing in yellow. Log messages can also be saved to a file or copied and
+pasted into other applications, which has been useful for users when they are
+seeking assistance.
+
+\subsection{Internationalization}
+
+We have found that good support for multiple languages is an important
+component of a Tor GUI, since many of Tor's users are not native English
+speakers. Vidalia currently supports 12 languages in addition to English, and
+all translations have been contributed by Vidalia users. Designing the
+interface with translators in mind has also helped us keep the user-visible
+strings simple and avoid Tor-specific jargon. As an example, the ``New
+Identity'' button was initially labeled ``New Nym'', but ``nym'' did not
+translate well to other languages.
+
+
+\section{Future Improvements}
+\label{sec:future-work}
+
+\subsection{Improved Status Notifications}
+
+Recent versions of Tor have the ability to notify GUIs of important status
+updates, such as when one of the user's applications may be using an unsafe
+version of the SOCKS protocol that could leak the destination of the
+application's ``anonymous'' connection. Currently, such notifications
+appear only in the message log, which the user may not notice.
+
+We want to make Vidalia aware of these events and be able to present them more
+prominently to the user, without being too obtrusive. On platforms that
+support system tray icons, we might have a message bubble appear near the tray
+icon letting the user know about important Tor status changes or events. For
+other systems without standard system notification areas, a simple message box
+will likely have to suffice.
+
+\subsection{Tighter Application Integration}
+
+While our bundled installation packages make installing and configuring the
+multiple software packages typically used with Tor nearly trivial, we have
+found it can be confusing to users {\it why} each component is useful. Some
+users mistakenly think Vidalia is the application that actually provides their
+anonymity, while others do not understand the added security Privoxy can
+provide.
+
+It may be much simpler from the user's perspective if we combined Vidalia,
+Tor and Privoxy into a single application. A good first step would be for
+Vidalia to launch and manage Privoxy, much like it currently does for Tor.
+
+
+\section*{Acknowledgments}
+\label{sec:acknowledgments}
+
+We thank the numerous translators who have generously taken time to contribute
+translations to Vidalia's interface. We also thank Roger Dingledine and Andrew
+Lewman for useful design suggestions and feedback, website hosting, and
+packaging assistance.
+
+\bibliographystyle{abbrv}
+\bibliography{abstract}
+
+\end{document}
+
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