[tor-talk] ProxAllium - A Tor frontend for Windows

[Damon (TheDcoder)]

Hi Mirimir,

Your concerns are valid, and I agree with them. But the main goal of ProxAllium
is to enable the user to use Tor with normal applications, support for relays is
planned but it is not included in the current version. The next major release
will be re-written in C and it will be cross-platform, so users could use it on
Linux to run relays :)

I know some people who also intend to run relays on Windows, but I do not plan
to explicitly discourage them from doing so. I believe they would (or should) be
aware of what they are getting into before hosting a relay, so I leave that up
to them and only provide tools to make that happen.

In short, ProxAllium does not address these concerns, as it falls out-of-scope
of its goal. It is only a frontend to Tor, so if Tor can do it, ProxAllium will
most likely not stop it from doing so. That is my train of thought.

I believe it is all about the chain of trust that the user has. Do let me know
if you have any ideas which can improve these concerns without being too
restrictive arbitrarily, some resistance with warning messages in the GUI should
be enough I think.

With Regards, Damon H. (TheDcoder)

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On August 4, 2018 11:58 PM, Mirimir <mirimir at riseup.net> wrote:

> On 08/04/2018 10:17 AM, Damon (TheDcoder) wrote:
>
> > Hello everyone!
> > I would like to first say that ProxAllium is in no
> > way affiliated with the Tor
> > Project and it is developed independently by me at the moment.
> > Introduction: ProxAllium is a simple GUI frontend for Tor which works in
> > Windows, the main goal of this program is to allow the user to get Tor up
and
> > running without the need of using Tor Browser Bundle (TBB) and configuring
> > it.
> > ProxAllium makes the process easy by automatically generating a safe
> > configuration for Tor without any user interaction on the first launch!
> > It's GUI displays useful information like the port, proxy type, PID etc of
Tor
> > in a single place so that this information is very accessible.
>
> <SNIP>
>
> Hey, I get where you're coming from. The Tor Project wiki isn't all that
> helpful about standalone Tor setup in Windows. However, although I have
> zero affiliation with the Tor Project, it's my impression that this
> hasn't entirely been an oversight. In particular, I get that running
> relays in Windows is discouraged, in light of security concerns. That
> is, they're arguably more likely pwned by adversaries, and used to
> attack the network. And I suspect also that there are concerns about
> torrenting, which stresses the system.
>
> Perhaps more fundamentally, there are concerns about surveillance by
> Microsoft. I mean, using Tor arguably secures network traffic from
> adversaries, but what secures the system from Microsoft? In particular,
> unless users take extreme effort, Microsoft knows their identityies. And
> if Microsoft is logging browsing and other network traffic, and file
> operations, it arguably knows what users are doing, notwithstanding Tor.
>
> So anyway, how does ProxAllium address those concerns?
>
>
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