Dear Tor Devs,
Hello. My name is Greg Norcie, I'm a PhD student at Indiana University, working on a project focusing on improving Tor usability.
This is a follow up to a paper looking at usability issues with the Tor Browser Bundle. (http://petsymposium.org/2012/papers/hotpets12-1-usability.pdf).
The research group I'm leading is currently working on tweaking the Tor Browser Bundle to test solutions to the issues we noted in a formal lab study. (Our previous paper simply suggested changes, but did not scientifically validate our suggestions)
One issue we noted was people feeling Tor was slow. Now, this is a function of how Tor works - traffic passed through a series of nodes will always have more latency than a direct connection.
So we are experimenting with a custom extension that pops up a message to TBB users when a delay is detected, to see if reframing the delay makes users tolerate the latency better.
However, we have hit a snag. While in a normal, run of the mill Firefox install w/ the same extensions as the TBB, our extension functions - delays are detected and a pop up box appears.
However, when we install our custom extension in the Tor Browser Bundle, it fails to work. We initially thought this might be because our extension was utilizing Javascript, but disabling NoScript doesn't fix thes issue.
We're at a bit of a loss as to how to solve this issue, and are reaching out to the Tor developer community to see if anyone might be able to offer some insight as to what could be causing this failure. Our lead developer recently left the project, so we're struggling to get things on track in time for PETS)
The extension in question is available at the following URL (password is "cryptoparty" - our uni's MegaUpload clone requires a password for all files): https://www.slashtmp.iu.edu/files/download?FILE=gnorcie%2F1700EHKJOv
Any help anyone can provide would be greatly appreciated. (And of course, it goes without saying we will be making our code available to the Tor community)
Thanks for reading, have a great day.
Sincerely,
Greg Norcie PhD Student - Security Informatics Indiana University