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I've participated in 5 of these now. I've noticed new bugs, and have a new appreciation for the art of a UI design because of it. Feel free to ask any question

by derrida 13y ago

I've participated in 5 of these now. I've noticed new bugs, and have a new appreciation for the art of a UI design because of it. Feel free to ask any questions or drop into the irc at #cryptoparty on irc.oftc.net (you can connect through Tor) There have been 100's of them in >50 cities. It took off when the Australian Government notified the public that they intended to increase the powers of the intelligence agencies. It's not so much teaching cryptography as it would be in a university or hacker to hacker as it is teaching people all of the pitfalls and what's hidden from the UI and what's really going on when you say, use Tor.

niels_olson 13y ago
What are some of your bugs and design improvements? I plan on attempting one of this in the next couple of weeks.
- derrida 13y ago
  I was mostly helping people with Tor-related stuff and didn't have time to get a sense of the other usability issues out there in thinks like whole disk-encryption and PGP. There is a very literal UI bug that is also a security problem in the Tor Browser Bundle. If you resize the Firefox window, you increase your browsers uniqueness & thus make you easier to identify. Try this by switching off a toolbar and noticing the difference at panopticlick.eff.org Getting a piece of software like Pidgin to work through Tor was a challenge for many. The concepts of 'localhost' and sockets and a TCP-stream was challenging to get across. I don't really know the answer to this problem. These are hard issues to solve with software and the best we've got so far, I think, is education. If I had to imagine a piece of software: something like a packet filter that could go into 'incognito mode' set-up a transparent proxy and automatically flag packets that could reduce one's anonymity or reveal one's identity, then recommend steps to take in the relevant applications to get around that. It's not a completely thought through idea but maybe someone will come along and read this and it would spark the solution in their mind. There are more bugs than people, check out trac.torproject.org and see what you can do. The #tor irc channel on irc.oftc.net & tor-talk@lists.torproject.org are good places to ask questions.
  - thomasbk 13y ago
    The answer to things like the Pidgin configuration issue you mentioned could be https://tails.boum.org/ https://tails.boum.org/ -- a live USB distribution that runs all traffic through Tor, and comes with Pidgin preinstalled and preconfigured. It has optional encrypted persistence too.
    - derrida 13y ago
      Yes, I did show some people through this too. However, it's not usable as an everyday operating system, for, say researchers such as academics, or journalists.
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    The screen resolution is obtained by JavaScript, right? Would it not be possible to modify the Mozilla source code (in the TBB) so that it always returns a specific screen resolution, regardless of the actual resolution?

by derrida 13y ago

niels_olson 13y ago

What are some of your bugs and design improvements? I plan on attempting one of this in the next couple of weeks.

derrida 13y ago
I was mostly helping people with Tor-related stuff and didn't have time to get a sense of the other usability issues out there in thinks like whole disk-encryption and PGP. There is a very literal UI bug that is also a security problem in the Tor Browser Bundle. If you resize the Firefox window, you increase your browsers uniqueness & thus make you easier to identify. Try this by switching off a toolbar and noticing the difference at panopticlick.eff.org Getting a piece of software like Pidgin to work through Tor was a challenge for many. The concepts of 'localhost' and sockets and a TCP-stream was challenging to get across. I don't really know the answer to this problem. These are hard issues to solve with software and the best we've got so far, I think, is education. If I had to imagine a piece of software: something like a packet filter that could go into 'incognito mode' set-up a transparent proxy and automatically flag packets that could reduce one's anonymity or reveal one's identity, then recommend steps to take in the relevant applications to get around that. It's not a completely thought through idea but maybe someone will come along and read this and it would spark the solution in their mind. There are more bugs than people, check out trac.torproject.org and see what you can do. The #tor irc channel on irc.oftc.net & tor-talk@lists.torproject.org are good places to ask questions.
- thomasbk 13y ago
  The answer to things like the Pidgin configuration issue you mentioned could be https://tails.boum.org/ https://tails.boum.org/ -- a live USB distribution that runs all traffic through Tor, and comes with Pidgin preinstalled and preconfigured. It has optional encrypted persistence too.
  - derrida 13y ago
    Yes, I did show some people through this too. However, it's not usable as an everyday operating system, for, say researchers such as academics, or journalists.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  The screen resolution is obtained by JavaScript, right? Would it not be possible to modify the Mozilla source code (in the TBB) so that it always returns a specific screen resolution, regardless of the actual resolution?