August 2019 - tbb-dev - lists.torproject.org

Nightly rebase experiment proposal
by Arthur D. Edelstein 03 Feb '20

03 Feb '20

Hi everyone, Here's a plan for experimenting with moving Tor Browser from ESRs to mozilla-central. Why try this? There are several reasons I can think of: * There is no mobile Firefox ESR. In order to keep mobile Tor Browser secure, we would either need to constantly monitor for security fixes and apply backports. It will be simpler to follow the Mozilla release cycle. * Tor Browser will receive all security patches and security features from Mozilla, not simply those deemed important enough to backport to the last ESR. * Closer collaboration between Mozilla and the Tor Browser team will be possible, because everyone will be focused on the same codebase. For example, non-urgent patches can land directly on mozilla-central, bypassing tor-browser.git altogether, and those patches will be deployed to Tor Browser faster than they would have been on an ESR-only schedule. Mozilla will provide expert review of patches. Also, some non-urgent patches by Tor Browser may be written by Mozilla engineers. * The Tor Browser development process will be smoother and more gradual. Instead of rebasing and patch-fixing sprints ahead of each ESR, we can automatically rebase patches every night, and fix any patch whenever its rebase fails. (The total rebase effort should be approximately the same as before.) * Patches that frequently break because they live on "hot code" can be identified and uplifted. * We'll need to continuously monitor the mozilla codebase for new features that could harm privacy. That's potentially difficult, but by focusing on Mozilla's current work, we can hopefully stop patches that affect privacy before they land. Here's how I envision the new rebase process: * An automated script rebases all tor browser patches every night against mozilla-central, mozilla-beta, mozilla-stable and mozilla-esr. An email alert will be sent if the rebase of any patch fails. (I have a prototype script that does the basic rebasing -- it found that ~40/140 patches from our ESR-52 branch could be auto-rebased onto mozilla-central without any intervention.) * Any failed patches will need to be manually fixed up promptly so that the automated rebase can resume. * Diagnostic Tor Browser bundles will be built against the latest rebase branches. We can also run regression tests. So how do we ramp up this experiment? 1. 2018-1-1 to 2017-2-22: Rebase tor-browser.git patches manually on top of Firefox 59-beta. (We have to do this anyway.) 2. 2017-2-22 to 2018-3-13: Activate a script that rebases Tor Browser patches nightly onto mozilla-(central, beta, stable, esr). 3. 2018-03-13 to 2018-05-07: Create nightly Tor Browser bundle builds based on nightly rebases. At this point, we can evaluate whether we would like to transition to releasing Tor Browser alphas based on the mozilla-beta branch. Switching Tor Browser stable to mozilla-stable can happen sometime after that. How does this sound? Interested to hear what you think. Thanks, Arthur

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Next weekly Tor Browser meeting on 9/3 1730 UTC in #tor-meeting2
by Georg Koppen 29 Aug '19

29 Aug '19

Hello! There won't be a meeting on next Monday, 9/2, due to a public US holiday. We therefore moved our weekly sync to 9/3 1730 UTC in #tor-meeting2. See you there, Georg

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Tor unable to parse Bridge setting if using domain
by Hikari 28 Aug '19

28 Aug '19

Hello everybody! Sorry if I'm asking on the wrong list. I'm using Tor Expert in Win10 to bypass my office's firewall. It has multiple level of blocks: domains, IPs and ports. Most bridges I get from BridgesDB are blocked, but over time I've found a few that work there. I had setup a Tor bridge on my home server. When I test it using 4G it works. It happens that my ISP's dynamic IPs are blocked too. I managed to find a domain I can use and isn't blocked, so when I go to my server's web server using its IP I get blocked, but when I go using my domain I'm able to browse it. Now I'm strugging to get Tor client at office to connect to my Tor bridge at home. If I use|Bridge 51.113.0.17:80|(a obfuscated IP, not the current one) it fails as happens with most bridges on BridgeDB. But when I use|Bridge hikari.mydomain.com:80|(which works if accessed from a browser on port 8080) I get|Error parsing Bridge address 'hikari.mydomain.com:80'. Failed to parse/validate config: Bridge line did not parse.| Any idea why it's not parsing domains on bridge setting?

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esr68 Tor Browser build downloads?
by Rusty Bird 22 Aug '19

22 Aug '19

Hi, Are there any download links for unofficial (or semi-official) Tor Browser builds based on Firefox ESR 68? Some sort of pre-alpha nightly build server output maybe. Or just whatever you have lying around. :) Rusty

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