[tor-bugs] #4069 [Tor Support]: Develop a short overview and walk-through of using Tor for new users

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#4069: Develop a short overview and walk-through of using Tor for new users
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 Reporter:  runa         |          Owner:  runa
     Type:  task         |         Status:  new 
 Priority:  normal       |      Milestone:      
Component:  Tor Support  |        Version:      
 Keywords:               |         Parent:      
   Points:               |   Actualpoints:      
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Comment(by arma):

 Replying to [comment:9 runa]:
 > If you want to comment on the contents of this manual, please do so
 today.

 Thoughts, from higher priority to lower priority.

 A) "If Tor still doesn't work, it's likely that your Internet Service
 Provider (ISP) is blocking Tor." I think we should try to clarify the
 countries in which this is true. To my knowledge the country where it
 is true is China; it is not true outside of China -- and *in* China,
 the bridges you get from bridgedb probably aren't going to work for
 you anyway.

 https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq#DoesntWork needs a rewrite now that
 TBB is our favored install, but it has some good suggestions for what to
 do if Tor still doesn't work. Smart ones include "look at your Vidalia
 message log window" and "are you running a security or antivirus tool
 that is breaking Tor's ability to use the network".

 I think we probably want to include bridges and the open proxy config
 suggestions as a separate section ("be prepared for when your government
 tries to block Tor"), and focus on giving people debugging tips if their
 Tor doesn't work, rather than telling them to use a bridge.

 In the bridge section, we should also tell them to expect to have to fetch
 a new set of bridges every few days since the ones they get will go down
 (we tell them to set several, but we should explicitly tell them they'll
 want to build a habit of fetching new ones).

 B) Some points are not currently accurate, e.g. 1) you say that gettor
 works with macosx, yet currently it doesn't because the bundle is too
 big for all common mailservers. 2) "All you need to do is join the HTML5
 trial" is not true right now either, since Torbutton somehow prevents
 the join cookie from sticking.

 If we're planning to roll this out to people asap, should we try to make
 it accurate for now, and then plan to change it later once we make things
 work better?

 C) Littler things:

 In the "How Tor works" section, you say 'server' in many cases where we've
 chosen in all the other docs to say 'relay'. We originally opted away
 from server because it gives people an image of a huge centralized IBM
 machine maintained by The Tor Project rather than a computer somewhere.

 "It is technically possible to use Tor with other browsers, but by doing
 so you may open yourself up to potential attacks." doesn't need the 'may'.

 D) The section on checking the signature doesn't teach the user anything
 about what GPG actually does. We might as well just ship them SHA-1 hashes
 of the download files. We should plan to clean up the verifying-signatures
 page to explain trust chains, and extract key points from it into an
 updated version of this text. That process shouldn't block getting this
 document out the door though.

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4069#comment:15>
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