[tor-talk] install adobe flash player on TBB

[Seth David Schoen]

esolve esolve writes:

> and  when viewing youtube, I  captured packets on the network interface, I
> noticed that all traffic is through the Tor node
> so it seems that flash doesn't bypass the proxy setting at all.

The TBB developers' concern about proxy bypass is that sites _can_ make
Flash bypass the proxy (if they decide to), not that it always bypasses
the proxy.  Whether the proxy bypass occurs depends on the particular
Flash applet, so while the YouTube applet (for example) is apparently
safe, other applets are not safe.  This is a problem because people might
actively try to identify Tor users, for instance by trying to get them
to visit pages that embed Flash applets that do cause a proxy bypass.
(Exit node operators could try to do this too: they could modify the
HTML code returned by a web site to add an iframe that loads a Flash
applet to cause a proxy bypass.)

So, it's not that Tor users always lose their anonymity when they use
Flash, but that Tor users could lose their anonymity when they use
Flash.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
454 Shotwell Street, San Francisco, CA  94110   +1 415 436 9333 x107