[tor-dev] I have a group at internet archive that are interested in buying a lot of OnionPi's

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Jun 28, 2014 at 10:11:24PM +0200, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> On 06/27/2014 09:44 PM, Virgil Griffith wrote:
> > What is the current state of the art on this, and if it is ready for
> > larger deployment want to buy about 50-100 of them.
> 
> In my eyes, an access point that has a captive portal that teaches
> people about Tor and facilitates the download of Tor Browser etc is much
> better than transparent proxying.

Right. Using a transparent torifying box as a client is dangerous,
because your Internet Explorer or other "normal" browser will probably
introduce surprising privacy problems compared to using Tor Browser.
Using your middlebox as a firewall to prevent non-Tor traffic from
transiting, i.e. to make sure you are using only Tor, is much safer but
also much less sexy.

And the onionpi boxes don't have enough cpu to be a useful relay.

They do have enough cpu to be useful bridges, but vanilla bridges aren't
very useful in the world these days: all the places where you need a
bridge you probably need one of the somewhat recent pluggable transports,
like obfs3, too. I wonder what the state is of easy-to-install images
that include modern pluggable transports and are maintained. Sounds like
another "volunteers needed" situation. :)

--Roger