suggestion for 'is my installation of tor working?' page

[Nick Mathewson]

On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 08:58:36PM -0800, Wesley Kenzie wrote:
> I've got an initial version up now at http://www.showmyip.com/torstatus/ -
> feedback welcome!  More content and links to come!

As others have noted, this is really excellent, but there's way too
much information there for it to be useful for unsophisticated users.
There's no way that my dad, for example could tell that his window
width and height identify him far more uniquely than do his User-Agent
or his "DMA code".

Maybe there should be some kind of "What I Learned" section at the
top, with parts like:

  Javascript said:   "Your IP is x.y.z.w".
     (Learn more about how to disable Javascript _here_.),
  Java said: "Your IP is x.y.z.w.":
     (Learn more about how to disable Java _here_.)

That is, sort information by order of significance of disclosure, and
for each piece of information, tell users what it means, how much it
isolates them, and how to stop disclosing it.

Also, is there some way to see, use, and distribute the source for
these pages?  As long as you operate them, yours will of course be
most popular, but my free software instincts make me ask "what do we
do if Wesley is unavailable for a while?"


-- 
Nick Mathewson
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