I agree, people are working on network-wide attacks (which is great) but the biggest and most obvious risk to user privacy/anonymity is scripts. Perhaps firefox and noscript should come bundled and configured? Ringo Kamens
On 2/15/07, James Muir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Nick Mathewson wrote: > On Sun, Feb 04, 2007 at 08:58:36PM -0800, Wesley Kenzie wrote: >> I've got an initial version up now at http://www.showmyip.com/torstatus/ - >> feedback welcome! More content and links to come! > > As others have noted, this is really excellent, but there's way too > much information there for it to be useful for unsophisticated users. > There's no way that my dad, for example could tell that his window > width and height identify him far more uniquely than do his User-Agent > or his "DMA code". > > Maybe there should be some kind of "What I Learned" section at the > top, with parts like: > > Javascript said: "Your IP is x.y.z.w". > (Learn more about how to disable Javascript _here_.), > Java said: "Your IP is x.y.z.w.": > (Learn more about how to disable Java _here_.) > > That is, sort information by order of significance of disclosure, and > for each piece of information, tell users what it means, how much it > isolates them, and how to stop disclosing it. > > Also, is there some way to see, use, and distribute the source for > these pages? As long as you operate them, yours will of course be > most popular, but my free software instincts make me ask "what do we > do if Wesley is unavailable for a while?" Along with having a web page which attempts to educate Tor users about the dangers of executing Java, JavaScript, Flash, etc. in their browsers, I think there also needs to be a stronger warning about this on the main Tor web site (tor.eff.org). There is a warning on the wiki but this is something that's important enough to promote to the main page (and have translated). There are Java and Flash applets that, when run in a Tor user's browser, will open non-proxied connections back to their originating web sites and thus expose a user's real IP address. This is, I think, the most serious threat to Tor users who don't disable these in their browsers -- never mind fingerprinting my machine by capturing my screen resolution, etc. with JavaScript. The NoScript extension with FireFox works great -- it disables all scripts and plugins. I hope people who really need anonymity are using these. However, I expect that many are using IE. I don't run Windows, but I would guess that there probably isn't an easy way to disable Flash in IE. A clear warning with the Tor client installation instructions might help new Tor users better protect their anonymity. -James
