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  • #14121
Closed (moved) (moved)
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Issue created Jan 06, 2015 by proper@proper

make TBB usable as "system Tor"

TLDR

We would like to use TBB as "system Tor".

Long

Why?

  • Most, latest technology for censorship circumvention, i.e. pluggable transports such as meek, scamblesuite, fte, etc. will not be packaged for Debian anytime soon.
  • Pluggable transports are due to their nature too dynamically evolving. There is a giant gap between availability of a pluggable transports and installability from stable distributions such as Debian.
  • Vidalia has been deprecated. There is no nicely looking, maintained way to easily configure Tor and bridges anymore besides the tor-launcher add-on.
  • TBB comes with the tor-launcher add-on, which is a well maintained GUI for configuration and troubleshooting of Tor and all sorts of the latest and greatest pluggable transports.
  • TBB comes with recent versions of Tor.
  • TBB is built reproducibly.

Current Problem

At the moment, TBB is an integrated browser package. It does not integrate well for use with other applications, with the general system. Because,

  • once you close the browser window, no other application can connect.
  • it's not possible to just configure and start Tor without opening the browser window
  • once Tor is configured, you cannot start Tor without running X server

Related

It's still an open task how to "Make TIMB and TBB/PTTBB cooperate in a smarter way.": https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/10950

Maybe we can think of something to solve both at once.

Solution

This is one solution that might work. Not necessarily the ultimate one. A rough plan.

A combination of new start scripts + environment variables obeyed by tor-launcher.

  • keep ~/tor-browser_en-US/start-tor-browser as is
  • add other launcher scripts to the Browser (or so) sub directory to keep your main directory simple
  • add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-tor-only
  • add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/stop-tor-only
  • add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/configure-and-start-tor
  • add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/configure-tor-only (if that is possible)
  • add ~/tor-browser_en-US/Browser/start-browser-only (connect to previously started Tor)

That should suffice making TBB usable as "system Tor".

What do you think?

Feedback

What do you think about this proposal in general?

Linostar and I have some other solutions involving xul launcher in mind. Maybe you have some other possible solution in mind?

Depending on how much, complex, difficult this task is, linostar might provide a patch to add this feature.

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