30MB of duplicated data in profile directory, httpseverywhere gone wild
TOR DEVS: please ignore the jakegate conspiracy stuff below and just tell us: is tor browser doing something different now, as is alleged below?
below is copy+pasted from rixstep.com/2/2/20160817,00.shtml
Not that there's necessarily any connection to Jakegate (it can't be ruled out either) but the latest updates of Tor have been a frightening mess. Why does Tor suddenly dump over 30 megabloats of steaming faeces onto a file system on exit?
Picking a side in Jakegate isn't relevant. For those using Tor (it should be more all the time) the main concern is the health of the project. Given what some brave people are now saying, Tor went through an internal 'coup'.
They say Jake wasn't so much a key programmer as a key spokesman. So his leaving the project shouldn't affect the quality of the project. But pushing Jake out seems to have been part of a larger process, with a whole new regime now in place and the 'old guard' being systematically eliminated.
This is where the regime change comes into focus: Tor is a privacy tool; that privacy must extend beyond anonymous surfing to not leaving reams of potentially compromising junk in a file system. Resident spy tools can easily scan this flotsam and potentially cull private information. If Tor never needed do this before, then why now the sudden change?
Most of the junk left behind comes from an EFF extension, but this extension has been used all along, and it serves no purpose to copy the data out to yet another location. If this is caused by an error at EFF, why hasn't this been corrected?
And it's not only EFF data dumped on disk. The depository itself is fully new and it dates to after Jakegate.
Happenstance, coincidence, enemy action? Right now Tor is crap and getting downright scary.