[tor-talk] Why corrupt government officials blah blah bleh blah

[Griffin Boyce]

Travis Bean wrote:
> The developer(s) behind TorBrowserBundle are not the authority on
> computer security. They may think installing vanilla Firefox with
> Privoxy and Tor is not sufficient, but this is not a valid point. Linux
> computer users find TorBrowserBundle to be unwieldy and completely
> insufficient for meeting their needs regarding easy installation and
> configuration of a secure communications system.

True, it does require two commands to start the Tor Browser in Linux:

cd tor-browser_en-US/
./start-tor-browser

   That's clearly way too many for Linux users, who are well-known to 
avoid both the terminal and software customization.  Thankfully the Tor 
Browser works for most users without needing additional configuration.  
And there's a discussion ongoing about making a .desktop file that will 
allow users to simply double-click it to launch [1].  I think that will 
get Linux users pretty far, but given how mainstream and usable Linux 
distributions tend to be, Tor may need to do more to reach out and 
integrate better with the free software community [2].  I'd recommend 
having a solid showing at FOSDEM, LibrePlanet, DebConf, or possibly even 
the Chaos Communications Congress.  And maybe the developer(s) could 
utilize reproducible builds[3].  Of course the *real* win would be 
automatically seeking out updates via the tor network so that users are 
better protected from emerging threats.  Maybe someday [4].

sarcastically yours,
Griffin

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13375
[2] http://freehaven.net/anonbib/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pAen7beYNc
[4] Or last year. Whichever.

-- 
“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”
― Dr. Seuss