Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On 2/12/2012 7:39 PM, AK wrote: I think Ghostery + Adblock Plus + No Script is overkill. Choose one. They all pretty much do the same thing. Block nasty javascript. No Script seems appropriate for the Tor Browser due to it's default aggressive stance on any javascript. But just curious, which part of Ghostery is closed source, because when I open up the xpi I don't see any binaries, but haven't looked at everything. There may be some overlap of functions, but they each perform (at least some) very diff functions. That becomes clear when read the basic description of each extension. I honestly DON'T know if NoScript, appropriately configured, can do everything that AdBlock and / or Ghostery can, because it is a very complex extension, even for above avg users. If one is a No Script Guru, they may know the answer. One question is, even if NoScript can be configured to do everything AdBlock Ghostery can, would those be appropriate settings for Tor users? Even though NoScript is included in TBB, users changing all sorts of default settings isn't necessarily a good idea, w/o knowing (through accurate testing) all implications to anonymity of TBB. That's just for NoScript. We have no idea of ALL implications of using AdBlock Plus Ghostery, much less all 3 together. Unfortunately, I've seen very little documentation from Tor Project about changing default settings in NoScript. I'd personally like to see some official Tor Project documentation on configuring * some * NoScript settings in TBB. Even if it said something like, Except for options XYZ, leave everything else in NoScript the hell alone. ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On 13.02.2012 19:58, Joe Btfsplk wrote: I honestly DON'T know if NoScript, appropriately configured, can do everything that AdBlock and / or Ghostery can No, it can't. You are right in that it these extensions perform different functions, and it makes sense to use them all. For example, you might want to enable scripting for particular sites (Noscript), but still remove ads (Adblock) and tracking cookies (Ghostery). I would also recommend a Cookie Manager and some other addons, but: I do not want them to be included in a Tor Browser, the same way I do not want them included in the already bloated Firefox itself. If Firefox would bundle useful addons I would very much welcome that, but as a separate installer. Isn't it obvious that if you want a safe browser, all components need to be carefully audited, and this *each time* one of those components is updated? How is Torproject supposed to take care of that? A lot of workload... -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
RefControl set to spoof referrer as host webroot is also useful, I think. - Original Message - From: Brian Franklin Sent: 02/12/12 09:53 AM To: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Two reasons 1. Privacy. Fairly obvious why we do this. Stopping ads and ad tracking is consistent with the privacy mission of the Tor Project. 2. Network health. Congestion has always been a problem on Tor. Installing these plugins to stop HTTP requests which don't help the user reduces congestion on the network and speeds up page loads for each user and everybody else. Browsers won't be slowed down loading tons of ads and ad scripts and the network won't have to process many requests for junk. I think we can save a ton of bandwidth by stopping the junk requests. While we are at it we should enable Firefox's do not track header. It won't help the network speed but it will marginally increase privacy for those who have it set. It will also protect the privacy of people who enable it manually if all Tor bundle installations are sending the same headers. It also increases the use of the header in the wild because the mo re browsers that send it the more advertisers and governments have to take notice of our desire for privacy. The Tor project can make a big contribution to making this header more widely used. The Adblock should be configured to work and not need setup. Select a few good lists and have them automatically in. This will save users the time of doing it themselves and help people who don't know how. Ghostery has to be configured to block tracking scripts and cookies before first use. The Tor project should have that done automatically. If anybody doesn't want to use Adblock they can disable it with one click. I don't know why anybody who goes to the trouble of using Tor would want to be tracked by ads but to each his own. Disabling it takes 2 seconds if somebody want's to. ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:00:59 +0100 Martin Hubbard martin.hubb...@gmx.us wrote: RefControl set to spoof referrer as host webroot is also useful, I think. - Original Message - From: Brian Franklin Sent: 02/12/12 09:53 AM To: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Two reasons 1. Exit nodes and sites can make a traffic analysis based on unique profiles of banned urls. Malicious exits nodes even can inject invisible blocked patterns to make this analysis more active. Adblock and other similar user-tunable plugins should be avoided. Check https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ The Design and Implementation of the Tor Browser [DRAFT] ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
i tend to agree, but i guess theres several things to keep in mind: - Usability. Ghostery is _very_ user friendly, but still it can break widget based sites, e.g. iGoogle. - Endorsement. If a Plugin is included into the TBB, that may be considered as the Tor guys think this is very safe! i run NoScript, RequestPolicy, Convergence.io and Ghostery together, and that breaks like 90% of sites to some degree. i know what is going on and i want it like this. someone who gets the same browsing experience from TBB fresh out of the box might just assume the browser to be broken and abandon it. thats not what we want. just imagine you switch out the default browser of $elderly_person_you_know... if they notice anything besides the internet is slower lately, they might freak out. thats the kind of user that wont install AdBlock and Ghostery themselves and may benefit from a default installation. it has to work smoothly for all their use cases. i'm not sure how to adress the second concern i raised above, but if thats a non-issue, maybe a little text on the TBB default homepage educating users about those plugins might do the trick as well? all the best -k On 02/12/2012 04:53 PM, Brian Franklin wrote: Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Two reasons 1. Privacy. Fairly obvious why we do this. Stopping ads and ad tracking is consistent with the privacy mission of the Tor Project. 2. Network health. Congestion has always been a problem on Tor. Installing these plugins to stop HTTP requests which don't help the user reduces congestion on the network and speeds up page loads for each user and everybody else. Browsers won't be slowed down loading tons of ads and ad scripts and the network won't have to process many requests for junk. I think we can save a ton of bandwidth by stopping the junk requests. While we are at it we should enable Firefox's do not track header. It won't help the network speed but it will marginally increase privacy for those who have it set. It will also protect the privacy of people who enable it manually if all Tor bundle installations are sending the same headers. It also increases the use of the header in the wild because the more browsers that send it the more advertisers and governments have to take notice of our desire for privacy. The Tor project can make a big contribution to making this header more widely used. The Adblock should be configured to work and not need setup. Select a few good lists and have them automatically in. This will save users the time of doing it themselves and help people who don't know how. Ghostery has to be configured to block tracking scripts and cookies before first use. The Tor project should have that done automatically. If anybody doesn't want to use Adblock they can disable it with one click. I don't know why anybody who goes to the trouble of using Tor would want to be tracked by ads but to each his own. Disabling it takes 2 seconds if somebody want's to. ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On 2/12/2012 10:41 AM, Brian Franklin wrote: Unknown makes a good point. The options should be set globally for all users of the Tor Bundle to avoid any profiling. Those who have a need for further configuration do so at their own risk. Good point. Originally, at least part of the Tor design was users couldn't be tracked from end to end - period. Nothing about profiling based on customization. Now things have changed - obviously. A lot of users (apparently) don't want to use TBB in its current default state. That may / may not be good for the crowd and / or them. I don't have enough deep, technical knowledge to say. One thing I do know, is the internet, trackers, hackers, gov'ts, etc., keep discovering new tools refining ways to track Tor NON - Tor users. Tor devs constantly have to keep up try to stay even, if not ahead of the adversaries. Overall, they do a good job I'm pretty sure all but experienced software devs w/ an excellent knowledge of security issues, have no idea how hard this is for Tor devs. That still leaves the question, should TBB users install addons that haven't been explicitly tested proclaimed safe to use w/ TBB (as safe as the internet or TBB can reasonably be - NOTHING is or ever will be 100%). I don't know, but topic probably deserves more official discussion. Now that Tor / TBB has become internationally well known, to extent some countries already ban it U.S. ( others) has considered legislation that would affect its overall use, the big problem for users may soon be, are you using Tor _at all_, not just, could someone profile you from browser / addon settings? One big question - is it a necessity (no way around it) for sites or traffic monitors to see what extensions are installed or other non - default TBB settings (other than bare minimum, like browser ver., OS, etc.). I don't understand the problems involved, so I'm asking the stupid questions on others' behalf. Why is it necessary that data like Ghostery (or many other) extensions are installed, be made available to sites from TBB? Why is it necessary (or is it?) for extension devs to write them so that the extension(s) installed are made known to sites? [I'm basing the question on many posts to the list about if users use xyz addon, or change TBB default settings, it's possible to fingerprint them]. Why does a site have to know WHAT is blocking a tracker beacon or an ad, rather than just they ARE blocked? NoScript is included in TBB w/ all scripts allowed in default settings. So every user has it enabled (by default). There must be an extraordinary # of customization possibilities w/ that one extension. If users blacklist one site in NoScript, they're automatically different. Cookies are globally enabled by default in TBB, so those blocking them are automatically different. Is there more risk to users being profiled as unique, by blacklisting ONE site in NoScript (or any other routine changes) than there is by installing Ghostery, AdBlock Plus, etc? Admittedly, I may not fully understand the problems here. When any of many cookie managers / blockers (aside from native Firefox / Aurora) blocks cookies, I don't think the site knows Cookie Monster is blocking cookies, does it? It just says, Your browser isn't accepting cookies. Maybe I'm wrong sites DO know it's Cookie Monster?? But if not, seems the same principle would (often) apply to blocking beacons, ads many other things using extensions, would it not? Using TBB, sites don't have your true IP address, true geographical location, etc. Why do they need to know which extensions are installed or the settings of them? Don't shoot the messenger - I'm just asking some questions that I haven't seen discussed - here - in detail. ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On 2/12/2012 3:00 PM, Patrick Mézard wrote: For me, a more basic question is whether installing extensions from a fresh Tor installed is (sufficiently) safe. I do not know the details of the process but it probably involves some HTTPS connections to addons.mozilla.org. If the exit node can perform MITM attacks on SSL you may end up installing something unwanted. Could the initial setup be made safer, for instance by storing digests of addons.mozilla.org certificate in Tor bundles at build time and *warn* if they do not match (like a specialized Certificate Patrol would do)? Is it already addressed in Firefox? -- Can't checking for addons' check for updates be unchecked in Aurora / Firefox Options? As well as for the browser search plugins? Does that not solve the problem of some addon connecting to MAO during a Tor session? ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
Agreed about the dangers of add-ons and info here https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ The Design and Implementation of the Tor Browser [DRAFT] not sure if maintaining ghostery or adblock via Tor is worth the trouble as they might/might not improve the user experience but they don't from my standpoint push forward the design and implementation goals. I would say a first consideration might be to address mitm attacks. We have seen major problems with certificate authorities and most governments can write certificates. Tor has a vulnerability with mitm attacks. (everyone does) A migration towards a system like convergence (convergence.io) with a decentralized trust of SSL would probably be a good thing. Currently there are some conflicts between Tor and the convergence add-on working together but if this could be addressed or the process was internalized and if Tor was shipped with a large number of notaries (or approach this in the same way as bridges...not sure on this) then you would have a pretty complete solution. my 2 cents E75A7CF4 On 2/12/2012 10:29 AM, unknown wrote: On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 17:00:59 +0100 Martin Hubbard martin.hubb...@gmx.us wrote: RefControl set to spoof referrer as host webroot is also useful, I think. - Original Message - From: Brian Franklin Sent: 02/12/12 09:53 AM To: tor-talk@lists.torproject.org Subject: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle Two reasons 1. Exit nodes and sites can make a traffic analysis based on unique profiles of banned urls. Malicious exits nodes even can inject invisible blocked patterns to make this analysis more active. Adblock and other similar user-tunable plugins should be avoided. Check https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ The Design and Implementation of the Tor Browser [DRAFT] ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
I think Ghostery + Adblock Plus + No Script is overkill. Choose one. They all pretty much do the same thing. Block nasty javascript. No Script seems appropriate for the Tor Browser due to it's default aggressive stance on any javascript. But just curious, which part of Ghostery is closed source, because when I open up the xpi I don't see any binaries, but haven't looked at everything. On Sun, Feb 12, 2012 at 6:24 PM, Andrew Lewman and...@torproject.orgwrote: On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 00:31:28 - pro...@tormail.net wrote: Same goes for Adblock Plus. If it's safe, it should come preinstalled with TBB. Ads over Tor make no sense, you can not buy those things anonymously and ads and tracking waste Tor's and users bandwidth. Actually, you can buy stuff from ads through Tor. I've done it, works fine. The next version of TBB really should have Do-Not-Track enabled. If all TBB users have it activated by default, there are no fingerprinting issues. DNT is an opinion which all Tor users express by using Tor. I see no disadvantages by activating DNT by default. Sounds correct, but needs more research into anonymity set reduction, partitioning of those with or without DNT set, and does DNT reveal more info than the lack of tracking via torbutton now? -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x74ED336B ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On Sun, 2012-02-12 at 07:53 -0800, Brian Franklin wrote: The Adblock should be configured to work and not need setup. Select a few good lists and have them automatically in. This will save users the time of doing it themselves and help people who don't know how. For on this list who are not familiar with AdBlock, it is an advertisement blocking program that downloads pattern blacklists. Any URL that would be requested matching a pattern is not requested (to the best of my understanding). These blacklists are updated automatically on some regular schedule. The problem I see in Tor adopting AdBlock as a default-installed plugin is that it allows the controller of that list to censor websites without oversight. I think if AdBlock is installed by default in the Tor Browser Bundle, the list configured should be run by the Tor Project, since we have to trust it anyway if we're using its software. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:53:17 -0800 (PST) Brian Franklin bfranklin74...@yahoo.com wrote: 1. Privacy. Fairly obvious why we do this. Stopping ads and ad tracking is consistent with the privacy mission of the Tor Project. In general, I'm going to defer to Mike Perry, as he's our expert here. Stopping ads is not the goal of Tor. Stopping tracking is one goal of tor. We already defang and stop tracking by ads and ad networks through torbutton. Adblock will just make things more of a mess, and possibly undo the protections built into torbutton. See https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/ for the full details. 2. Network health. Congestion has always been a problem on Tor. Actually, the likely problem is cryptographic overload on relays. We seem to have a decent amount of unused bandwidth, https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#bandwidth. Installing these plugins to stop HTTP requests which don't help the user reduces congestion on the network and speeds up page loads for each user and everybody else. Browsers won't be slowed down loading tons of ads and ad scripts and the network won't have to process many requests for junk. I think we can save a ton of bandwidth by stopping the junk requests. Sounds like interesting research. I look forward to the results and data. Here's an informal set of research and data, https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/3461 Ghostery has to be configured to block tracking scripts and cookies before first use. The Tor project should have that done automatically. Ghostery is closed-source software. If we cannot see the source code, we cannot evaluate it for privacy threats. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x74ED336B ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
Re: [tor-talk] Adblock Plus and Ghostery should be included in Tor bundle
On 2/12/2012 6:53 PM, Ted Smith wrote: The problem I see in Tor adopting AdBlock as a default-installed plugin is that it allows the controller of that list to censor websites without oversight. I think if AdBlock is installed by default in the Tor Browser Bundle, the list configured should be run by the Tor Project, since we have to trust it anyway if we're using its software. Good point, but that would result in another project for Tor Project to develop maintain. Many would agree w/ you some of Tor devs * might * (in theory), but I wonder how realistic that undertaking is currently? Perhaps if funding for Tor Project were much larger there were many more developers. Right now, many AdBlock users are upset because it's developers have decided to allow some non intrusive advertising, by default (though users can opt out). If Tor Project DID develop something like this, it'd probably be better for Tor users than installing untested addons. I have no idea if this is feasible, but could someone from Tor Project approach (any) appropriate developers about developing (or allowing branches of) these or any other addons that Tor Project thinks are truly useful? It's true these 2 aren't open source. The issue of these 2 addons needing to update lists (during an anonymous TBB session) can be solved by turning off automatic updates in the addons' options - yes? ___ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
