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Category Archives: Tor Browser

Linux Top 3: Xfce, Quirky and Tails 1.3

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March 3, 2015 By Sean Michael Kerner

1) Xfce 4.12

After nearly three years of development Xfce 4.12 was released on February 28, marking the first official major version update since the Xfce 4.10 release.

This long period can only be explained by how awesome Xfce 4.10 was. But as all things, it needed some refreshing - and for that we saw lots of new contributors providing valuable feedback, features and bugfixes. As always, Xfce follows its steady pace of evolution without revolution that seems to match our users' needs.

Among the improvements in Xfce 4.12 are:

2) TAILS 1.3

The Amensic Incognito Live System (TAILS) debuted its 1.3 release on February 24, fixing at least 18 different security issues. All of those issues are upstream issues in Debian, which is the base on which TAILS is built and the Tor Browser, which itself is based on Mozilla's Firefox.

Tails is a privacy focused Linux operating system, loaded with multiple types of tools to help users stay private.

Aside from the security updates, Tails 1.3 includes the Electrum bitcoin wallet

There is also an interesting update to support even more privacy on Tor. According to the release notes:

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Linux Top 3: Xfce, Quirky and Tails 1.3

Tails 1.3 released

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Tails 1.3 released

Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) 1.3 has been released. This version offers a new bitcoin wallet, updates to the Tor browser and numerous other changes.

See a list of changes and new features on the Tails site:

Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, version 1.3, is out. This release fixes numerous security issues and all users must upgrade as soon as possible.

New features:

Electrum is an easy to use bitcoin wallet. You can use the Bitcoin Client persistence feature to store your Electrum configuration and wallet.

The Tor Browser has additional operating system and data security. This security restricts reads and writes to a limited number of folders. Learn how to manipulate files with the new Tor Browser.

The obfs4 pluggable transport is now available to connect to Tor bridges. Pluggable transports transform the Tor traffic between the client and the bridge to help disguise Tor traffic from censors.

Keyringer lets you manage and share secrets using OpenPGP and Git from the command line.

More at Tails

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Tails 1.3 released

Snowden's favourite Linux – Tails – rushes sec-fix version to market

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Tails, the secure live-boot Linux made famous by Edward Snowden, has had a major revision release to Version 1.3.

The new version, released after testing since February 12, combines various security fixes with new apps and simplified install, the developers say.

The developers want to kill off the previous version, Tails 1.2.3, as soon as possible, with a list of 14 security issues covering everything from the Tor browser and its network security services (NSS) through to a sudo privilege escalation bug.

The new version of the Tor browser restricts reads and writes to a limited number of folders, and to help manage passwords, Tails 1.2.3 includes the Keyringer command line utility.

To make manual installation easier, the Mac and Linux installs no longer need isohybrid command support, and Tails now bundles GnuPG 2, which improves its support for OpenPGP smartcards.

Other major security fixes in Tails 1.3 include fixes to xdg-utils, the Jasper JPEG-2000 image manipulation library, a fix for the underlying Debian glibc implementation (eglibc), Open JDK, Unzip, the krb5 Kerberos library, Ruby 1.9.1, xorg-server, Libre Office, dbus, Bind 9, and the e2fsprogs file system utilities.

Sponsored: Todays most dangerous security threats

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Snowden's favourite Linux - Tails - rushes sec-fix version to market

Tor Browser Bundle for Mac | MacUpdate – Apple Mac OS X …

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The Tor Browser Bundle is an easy-to-use portable package of Tor, Vidalia, Torbutton, and a Firefox fork preconfigured to work together out of the box. It contains a modified copy of Firefox that aims to resolve the privacy and security issues in mainline version.

Tor was originally designed, implemented, and deployed as a third-generation onion routing project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. It was originally developed with the U.S. Navy in mind, for the primary purpose of protecting government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists, law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.

Privacy is a huge issue. Snooping around happens everywhere, everyday. What can we do? We can use TOR. Based on FF, TOR is fantastic at what it does- providing anonymity. With servers all over the world, TOR randomly keeps changing my location worldwide. Once if its Romania, the next time its Greece! It has far more reachability than HMA or any other web proxy programs. The only problem I have with it is that we don't get to choose the place and also that it skips servers sometimes when we are in the middle of something! And also I'm concerned about how safe it actually is, after what happened last year. Hope TOR isn't compromised. Long live anonymity!

Tor is slower than a snail on valium.

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Tor Browser Bundle for Mac | MacUpdate - Apple Mac OS X ...

DARPA Is Developing a Search Engine for the Dark Web

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A new search engine being developed by DARPA aims to shine a light on the dark web and uncover patterns and relationships in online data to help law enforcement and others track illegal activity.

The project, dubbed Memex, has been in the works for a year and is being developed by 17 different contractor teams who are working with the militarys Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Google and Bing, with search results influenced by popularity and ranking, are only able to capture approximately five percent of the internet. The goal of Memex is to build a better map of more internet content.

The main issue were trying to address is the one-size-fits-all approach to the internet where [search results are] based on consumer advertising and ranking, says Dr. Chris White, the program manager for Memex, who gave a demo of the engine to the 60 Minutes news program.

To achieve this goal, Memex will not only scrape content from the millions of regular web pages that get ignored by commercial search engines but will also chronicle thousands of sites on the so-called Dark Websuch as sites like the former Silk Road drug emporium that are part of the TOR networks Hidden Services.

These sites, which have .onion web addresses, are accessible only through the TOR browser and only to those who know a sites specific address. Although sites do exist that index some Hidden Services pagesoften around a specific topicand there is even already a search engine called Grams for uncovering sites selling illicit drugs and other contraband, the majority of Hidden Services remain well under the radar.

White says part of the Memex project is aimed at determining just how much of TOR traffic is related to Hidden Services sites. The best estimates before were in the single digitsin the one-thousands, he says. But we think there are, at any given time, between 30,000 and 40,000 Hidden Service Onion sites that have content on them that one could index.

The content on Hidden Services is publicin the sense that its not password protectedbut is not readily accessible through a commercial search engine. Were trying to move toward an automated mechanism of finding [Hidden Services sites] and making the public content on them accessible, White says. The DARPA team also wants to find a way to better understand the turnover of such sitesthe relationships that exist for example between two sites when one goes down and a seemingly unrelated site pops up.

But the creators of Memex dont want just to index content on previously undiscovered sites. They also want to use automated methods to analyze that content in order to uncover hidden relationships that would be useful to law enforcement, the military, and even the private sector. The Memex project currently has eight partners involved in testing and deploying prototypes. White wont say who the partners are but they plan to test the system around various subject areas or domains. The first domain they targeted were sites that appear to be involved in human trafficking. But the same technique could be applied to tracking Ebola outbreaks or any domain where there is a flood of online content, where youre not going to get it if you do queries one at a time and one link at a time, he says.

In a demo conducted for 60 Minutes, Whites team showed how law enforcement could possibly track the movement of peopleboth trafficked and traffickersbased on data related to online advertisements for sex. The 60 Minutes piece wasnt clear about how this was done and appeared to focus on the IP address of where the ads were hosted, implying that tracking where an ad moves from one IP address to another could reveal to law enforcement where the trafficker is located. But White says the IP address is the least important information they analyze. Instead they focus on other data points.

Sometimes its a function of IP address, but sometimes its a function of a phone number or address in the ad or the geolocation of a device that posted the ad, he says. There are sometimes other artifacts that contribute to location.

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DARPA Is Developing a Search Engine for the Dark Web

Download Tor!

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You need to change some of your habits, as some things won't work exactly as you are used to.

Tor does not protect all of your computer's Internet traffic when you run it. Tor only protects your applications that are properly configured to send their Internet traffic through Tor. To avoid problems with Tor configuration, we strongly recommend you use the Tor Browser. It is pre-configured to protect your privacy and anonymity on the web as long as you're browsing with the Tor Browser itself. Almost any other web browser configuration is likely to be unsafe to use with Tor.

Torrent file-sharing applications have been observed to ignore proxy settings and make direct connections even when they are told to use Tor. Even if your torrent application connects only through Tor, you will often send out your real IP address in the tracker GET request, because that's how torrents work. Not only do you deanonymize your torrent traffic and your other simultaneous Tor web traffic this way, you also slow down the entire Tor network for everyone else.

The Tor Browser will block browser plugins such as Flash, RealPlayer, Quicktime, and others: they can be manipulated into revealing your IP address. Similarly, we do not recommend installing additional addons or plugins into the Tor Browser, as these may bypass Tor or otherwise harm your anonymity and privacy.

Tor will encrypt your traffic to and within the Tor network, but the encryption of your traffic to the final destination website depends upon on that website. To help ensure private encryption to websites, the Tor Browser includes HTTPS Everywhere to force the use of HTTPS encryption with major websites that support it. However, you should still watch the browser URL bar to ensure that websites you provide sensitive information to display a blue or green URL bar button, include https:// in the URL, and display the proper expected name for the website. Also see EFF's interactive page explaining how Tor and HTTPS relate.

The Tor Browser will warn you before automatically opening documents that are handled by external applications. DO NOT IGNORE THIS WARNING. You should be very careful when downloading documents via Tor (especially DOC and PDF files) as these documents can contain Internet resources that will be downloaded outside of Tor by the application that opens them. This will reveal your non-Tor IP address. If you must work with DOC and/or PDF files, we strongly recommend either using a disconnected computer, downloading the free VirtualBox and using it with a virtual machine image with networking disabled, or using Tails. Under no circumstances is it safe to use BitTorrent and Tor together, however.

Tor tries to prevent attackers from learning what destination websites you connect to. However, by default, it does not prevent somebody watching your Internet traffic from learning that you're using Tor. If this matters to you, you can reduce this risk by configuring Tor to use a Tor bridge relay rather than connecting directly to the public Tor network. Ultimately the best protection is a social approach: the more Tor users there are near you and the more diverse their interests, the less dangerous it will be that you are one of them. Convince other people to use Tor, too!

Be smart and learn more. Understand what Tor does and does not offer. This list of pitfalls isn't complete, and we need your help identifying and documenting all the issues.

Link:

Download Tor!

Tor Browser Review Download: Protect Your Privacy and Surf …

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Tor is an acronym that stands for The Onion Router. While the name suggests it is a router, it is actually a browser. Tor is the browser that stands for anonymity and privacy on the Internet. This review of Tor talks about how Tor works and how it provides anonymity when you are browsing the Internet.

While Internet Explorer and Google Chrome offer the feature where you can browse anonymously (InPrivate and InCognito modes), they still lag behind when intermediaries sitting between source and destination of web traffic. When you browse the web, send an email or download audio/video or anything, data is sent inform of packets.

Each data packet has a header that tells about the source and destination of the data packet. Even if you are using an encrypted connection, the packet headers are vulnerable. Anyone sitting between the source and destination can read the packet header to know about you and your browsing habits. The people snooping include your ISPs, ad agencies and sometimes even the government agencies. As such, your browsing and what you see on the Internet is affected by the information others have gathered about you.

Tor has been developed with total concentration on the privacy of users. People use Tor to send confidential emails. The high level security of Tor makes it impossible for hackers to know the origination ofemails and thereby the location of sender. Following are some uses of Tor that make it clear as to who all need the safest browser available on the planet:

There are many uses of Tor especially in a world where user privacy has been under the prying eyes of different ad agencies, social networks and government agencies. Also, your ISPs intercept your connection requests before you actually connect to a website. Using Tor, you wont leave any data for such agencies.

Tor works on a network of relays formed by people who have volunteered for the project. Unlike other browsers that have fixed routers that receive data packets to forward them to their destinations, Tor browser uses a number of relays. To be clearer, here is the procedure:

The below figure shows how Tor works

The aim is clear to create a maze of relays so that all the information about the original source is lost in the network. This makes it impossible for the scripts on the destination website to track who sent the request/data and from where.

See more here:

Tor Browser Review Download: Protect Your Privacy and Surf ...


  1. Tor Browser