[tbb-dev] [Proposal] Tor Browser Quickstart - Call for Comments

[Matthew Finkel]

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 04:54:56PM +0100, anonym wrote:
> Matthew Finkel:
> > On Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 09:31:39AM +0200, intrigeri wrote:
> > > 2. Find, or write for scratch, another UI to configure & start
> > >     little-t-tor.
> > 
> > Yes, and I think the Tor Project and the Tor community should keep this
> > in mind. As Richard said, a configuration flow like this is needed for
> > many different applications and we should think about providing drop-in
> > solutions for this (instead of everyone developing their own).
> 
> Allow me to brainstorm a bit to see if we can avoid this extra implementation: what if Tor Browser can be told (perhaps with a --configure-tor-only parameter) to become essentially what Tor Launcher is now?
> 
> In other words, it lock itself down by disabling most of Firefox UI (menu, url and tab bar, etc) and functionality (in particular, no browsing!), and only display the Tor bridge configuration bits. If we had this, 3rd parties like Tails, Ricochet etc could just depend on Tor Browser to act as a "Tor Launcher", and no extra implementation is needed.


I think we should have a different solution than "include a full web
browser for configuring Tor". This may be a short- or medium-term
solution, but there isn't a good reason for ricochet bundling Tor
Browser only for configuring Tor.

> 
> You also talk about censorship detection: it is a bit unclear if Tor Browser will try to detect it itself with some background work, or it this detection is reactive, e.g. by looking at what sites the users tries to visit; if it's the former, that would also fit with my proposal. If it's the latter, well that sucks, but at least 3rd parties would get something with the same power as the current Tor Launcher.


In the beginning this will likely be a hard-coded list of known regions
where censorship is implemented based on prior knowledge (such as OONI
reports). In the next iteration of this feature, we will likely try
detecting censorship via automatic probing. We don't know exactly how
we'll do this at this time.

> 
> How crazy does this sound?

Slightly crazy :) but not too crazy

> 
> Cheers!  _______________________________________________ tbb-dev
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