[tor-talk] Onion Pi and Tor Talk Meta

[Roger Dingledine]

On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 03:11:24PM -0700, Charles Thomas wrote:
> 
> >Such setup is called ?transparent proxying?. This does not simulate
> >using Tails. Tails has removed transparent proxying (except for hidden
> >services) a while ago (0.10, 2012-01-04).
> I thought Tails worked by routing everything through Tor, as does
> the Onion Pi setup. Isn't Tails using transparent proxying, as
> everything is routed through Tor?

No, Tails explicitly configures its applications to use Tor as a proxy,
and then drops all unexpected connections. That's the safer thing to do --
if you get a connection from an application that you didn't explicitly
configure to use Tor, it's unlikely to be using Tor safely.

The alternative is to just Torify everything blindly. In that situation
you end up with people using their Internet Explorer over Tor and
thinking they're doing it right, when actually they're missing all the
application-level security/privacy features from Tor Browser:
https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

--Roger