Clarify general Internet connectivity
I was in an airport, with fairly restrictive internet. I had connected to the captive portal and logged in, so I could use the free airport wifi, and I wanted to turn on the Tor VPN to obfuscate my traffic. I launched it, pressed the connect button, and it showed connected, and data transfer rates started to show.
However, nothing was loading in my browser on my device, so I went to go look at the logs, and I found that onionmasq underneath was complaining about failing to connect to the tor network, it clearly was not actually connected and was retrying, but the UI was showing I was connected and that data was being transferred.
I failed to copy the logs, and I realize that its not trivial to re-produce this, but I thought I should file an issue to get this out there.
User research findings
During the usability tests of Tor VPN 0.6.2 (tpo/ux/research#69):
- 2/6 participants tried to connect Tor VPN without being connected to the Wi-Fi.
- 1/6 participant thought that they were not connected to the Internet when only Tor and Telegram were being blocked
Ideas
- Have a clear "No Internet" vs. "Yes Internet" state (MVP)
- Make the connection statuses more universal (MVP)
- Maybe in the future we'll allow people to block anything that is not Tor VPN
- In this scenario, we'll probably need a moat ping, e.g. #43