Confusion about TorButton, Noscript, etc.

Scott Bennett bennett at cs.niu.edu
Mon Aug 18 13:25:53 UTC 2008


     On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:57:42 +0200 sigi <dugongs at gmx.de> wrote:
>On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 11:17:57AM +0200, Karsten N. wrote:
>> Ringo Kamens schrieb:
>> > I'm working on a presentation where I teach people how to install Tor. I
>> > have always heard it is best practice to use NoScript and TorButton, but
>> > TorButton automatically hooks "dangerous javascript". Is there any
>> > reason to have noscript installed after that?
>> 
>> NoScript blocks other "dangerous content" like Java applets, flash,
>> siverlight... too. And it discover cross site scripting. So I prefer
>> NoScript and FoxyProxy.
>> 
>> FoxyProxy offers the possibility to configure some sites to be used
>> with a preselected proxy, may be switch to "tor" for all http://*.onion*
>
>In the faq <https://www.torproject.org/torbutton/faq.html>
>they warn you about foxyproxy. 
>
>What about other plugins like QuickJava? I think I don't need it 
>anymore with Torbutton installed, but do they confuse each other? 
>
     NoScript handles everything indisdcriminately, IIRC.  QuickJava allows
one to disable Java, while enabling JavaScript.  NoScript then allows one
to disable JavaScript on a site-by-site basis, while Java is disabled for
all sites by QuickJava.  QuickJava puts two small buttons at the bottom of
a Firefox window, one for Java and one for JavaScript.  Clicking on a
QuickJava button toggles the enabled/disabled status of whichever feature
it controls, so if you need to override it momentarily, it's trivial to do
so and then toggle it back as soon as you've gotten what you need.
     I'm currently using old software:  Firefox 1.5.0.8, TorButton 1.4.0.01,
and SwitchProxy 1.4.  My NoScript is 1.7.8 and should be reasonably current
because it's still getting updated frequently.  I'm not at all happy about
the ancient Firefox, but I'm kind of stuck with this setup until I next
install a new FreeBSD release.  Looks like the FreeBSD team has begun talking
about 7.1 lately, so it might even happen before the end of the year.  (I
generally avoid x.0 releases, so have sat with 6.3 quite a while.  However,
my ports tree is stuck at over a year ago, so no Firefox or TorButton
updates. :-< )
     Anyway, QuickJava is a nice complement to NoScript.


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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