On Thu, 29 Mar 2012 15:29:50 +0200 <pro...@secure-mail.biz> wrote: > What is the status of TorRouter? Any progress on the project? I've > been monitoring the active trac tickets and wiki sites. There are no > changes since a long time. Is the progress behind closed doors? > > What is up with that project? Became it to big, unmaintainable, > time-consuming? Or what are the issues, that no one is talking about > it anymore?
Torouter is still a work in progress. There are really two projects here, the one we want to build and ship in scale and the one the community is building already. The goal of the torouter is to increase the number of relays and bridges globally. The secondary goal is to make it easy to use tor through a dedicated device. Both projects are still so young I don't have a preference for one over the other. My goal is to get more tor relays and bridges globally. Whichever project manages to accomplish that first, wins. There are benefits and costs to both ideas. # Tor's ideas The current state is we're working on plans to build our own hardware to handle the torouter needs. The excito b3 and dreamplug hardware is great, but costs too much and includes too many other features not needed in a torouter. Features like audio/spdif, hdmi, 1080p HD video, bluetooth, etc are not needed and just increase the price of the base circuit board. We are experimenting with the Freescale iMX53 board [0] to see if the current ARMv7 chips can handle being a tor bridge or relay. It also works well as a ARM-arch build system for debs and rpms. We're working with Bunnie of Bunnie Studios[1], and he thinks the next-generation Freescale chipset and board are far better options, because of the ARMv9 architecture and crypto offload build into the chipsets. We think this is roughly a $500k project to get the hardware designed, manufactured, and to create a highly usable, point and click web interface for the system based on Debian's armhf distribution. We want to be able to offer hardware torouters, fully packaged and ready to go for under $75, while still covering ongoing support, maintenance, and future improvements. We're currently doing a beta-test of a web interface to Tor with the excito b3 hardware and around 20 people. I'll let Runa talk more about how it's going and summarize the feedback from the testers. There are lots of people excited about this project, but finding funding to get started has been a challenge. The base hardware we create can be re-purposed for other 'plug computing' projects beyond the torouter. We're pondering kickstarter as well as a for-profit subsidiary to get some funding to turn this into a reality. And finally, torouter is a poor name. Onionbox is the leading candidate for a public launch. # Community ideas The Access Labs team[2] and others continue to work on their original idea of a torouter based on openwrt with a luci/lua web interface for tor. They've made great progress and have their system working on current hardware on the market today. They are running into the challenges of running tor in tight environments with limited cpu and ram capacities. It's a fine challenge to solve, and they are making progress. Having an actual embeddable tor, which is fully functional, would be fantastic. It could open Tor up to many more devices. It's probably at the point where they could start a larger beta test to ship devices pre-configured with everything. The largest barrier to adoption is integrating their tor into an existing device. The vast majority of the world, including the technical community, wants something that just works. Buying a Buffalo device, installing openwrt, installing tor, configuring it all for transparent proxying, is more work than many are willing to do. However, buying a device that is pre-configured with all of this appeals to many more people. The future is bright and waiting. [0] https://media.torproject.org/image/community-images/imx53porn/ [1] http://www.bunniestudios.com/ [2] https://accesslabs.org/ -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475 _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk