[tor-talk] Follow-up - Re: how to stream videos using Tor

Aymeric Vitte vitteaymeric at gmail.com
Thu Jun 19 12:05:09 UTC 2014


I looked in more details what is doing youtube and how to stream it with 
the Tor Browser safely, first you must:

- make sure that flash is deactivated (default TBB setting)

- make sure that history and cookies are deactivated (Options/Privacy, 
default TBB setting), clear everything

- make sure that all types of local storages are deactivated, 
surprisingly it seems that there are no options in FF to block all types 
of local storage and the Tor browser allows to use localStorage, not 
allowing history seems to block some local storage but not always: 
about:config dom.storage.enabled false (and dom.indexedDB.enabled false, 
default TBB setting)

- personnaly I would clear (Options/Advanced/Network) and disable the 
cache completely about:config browser.cache.memory/disk.enable false

Not sure why the last two ones are not the default settings in TBB, 
maybe the Tor Button/noscript are doing something here but do not 
prevent youtube to use the localStorage (when noscript is temporarily 
disabled for example, see below, if you have some doubts you can check 
the localStorage from yt page using the web console: localStorage 
<enter> click on the object and display its properties, or use firebug 
DOM/window/localStorage).

This will force youtube to use the html5 player and make it difficult to 
fingerprint you, the get_video_info, get_video and videoplayback 
sequences do not send (for now) other information (like timezone, 
userid, etc) than the IP of the exit node, other tracking messages can 
probably not send a lot to fingerprint you.

Then you must temporarily allow the page with noscript.

With these settings youtube will provide an url for the video that will 
be streamed in the html5 video tag, when FF will support the Media 
Source Extensions API, adaptive streaming will apply to the video/audio 
like in Chrome.

As discussed earlier in this thread another alternative is to proxy VLC 
to Tor (localhost:9150) and stream the yt link, only the IP address of 
the exit node and the fact that you are using VLC (which can make it 
easy to fingerprint you) will be known.

Or use Peersm but unless there is an interest it is not foreseen for now 
to do specific changes to allow adaptive streaming from direct yt urls.

Le 04/06/2014 15:51, Aymeric Vitte a écrit :
>
> Le 03/06/2014 16:29, nobody a écrit :
>> The website doesn't work for me. Javascript is completely enabled but I
>> can't insert any links or clicking on stream/download/upload.
>
> These are demo buttons and input for links on the web site, only 
> "click here to use it" button works and redirect you to the app, maybe 
> we should change/clarify this.
>
>> Also http://peersm.com/peersm is complete blank.
>
> Yes, thanks to advise, there was an unfortunate (and forgotten) end of 
> May deadline for some old testing purposes, it's corrected.
>
>>
>> I use the TBB 3.6.1-Linux
>>
>>
>> Aymeric Vitte:
>>> You can use Peersm http://www.peersm.com (see the streaming demo video
>>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVaE8UZzDlA and the starter links
>>> http://www.peersm.com/?links-en) to stream/download anonymously from
>>> Peersm or bittorrent networks or the web.
>>>
>>> Even if not recommended for "normal" use you can use the TBB with 
>>> Peersm
>>> (I don't know what's the current FF version of the official TBB, you
>>> need FF>=26 for Peersm, if not see http://www.peersm.com/?use-en)
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>>
>>> Aymeric
>>>
>>> Le 26/05/2014 07:06, John Henry a écrit :
>>>> I cannot stream videos using my Tor browser and I wondered if anyone
>>>> could
>>>> explain how that can be done.
>

-- 
Peersm : http://www.peersm.com
node-Tor : https://www.github.com/Ayms/node-Tor
GitHub : https://www.github.com/Ayms



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