tor+torbutton without privoxy doesn't work

[Roger Dingledine]

On Thu, Jun 01, 2006 at 10:54:29PM +0200, Tymek W wrote:
> I had installed Tor+Privoxy on my Mac, but Privoxy started pissing me
> off. I uninstalled Privoxy and Firefox with Tor didn't work - I got the
> "The proxy server is refusing connections" error.

Well, yeah. Your Firefox was still configured to point to Privoxy.

>Can I use Tor without Privoxy? Is it possible?

(Answering this question out of order)

It is possible, but I've found it harder to explain to people how to do
it, so we simply recommend using Privoxy. If you want to take Privoxy
out of the loop, check out:
http://tor.eff.org/docs/tor-switchproxy.html
http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/
http://www.imperialviolet.org/deerpark.html
and recognize that you'll probably screw up your configuration,
since there are a lot of "how to do this correctly" questions that
even the Tor developers haven't looked at much yet.

> I uninstalled whole
> pack, restarted my computer, installed only Tor and Tor-startup package,
> updated Torbutton. I changed config in Torbutton not to use Privoxy and
> I still get the same error... I cannot use Tor... 

Ah ha, there is a new Torbutton out this week, with new features and
new bugs. Great. Here's a partial list from first playing with it:

* I agree with you that un-clicking "use Privoxy" in the new Torbutton
doesn't seem to work for me either. I'm using Firefox 1.0 in Debian Sarge.
When I un-click "Use Privoxy", it fills in "localhost" "9050" for every
proxy entry. It should just fill it in for the "socks" entry. As it
is now, my Firefox tries to use Tor directly as an http proxy, which
doesn't work.

* When I click "Use custom proxy settings" and remove the "localhost"
and "9050" from the http proxy, and click ok, it doesn't actually
take effect. I need to close firefox and restart and then it does.

* In the "About Torbutton" dialog, it doesn't tell me what version
I'm using. This makes it hard to report bugs well.

* I had to play around with it for a while, but it seems that it turns
Tor off every time I change anything in the "Preferences..." menu. What
I think that really means is that it's displaying the string "Tor
Disabled" when the proxy configuration does not exactly match the one
that we consider safe for Tor. This is great, but now that Torbutton
has multiple configurations that it wants to consider safe, we need to
update the logic for when to display "Tor Disabled".

Exciting,
--Roger