
Mozilla CTO: "Maybe we should just adopt, support, and bundle Tor in Firefox..." - andreypopp
https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/364265592112414720
======
stfu
This would be in my opinion the single most important development that came so
far out of the NSA controversy!

If they can somewhat manage to keep the user experience not complete
disappointment this will be the biggest steps forward to a broader privacy
adoption.

All those tools such as PGP, TrueCrypt, VPNs, have completely failed to reach
beyond a bunch of paranoid geeks. Mozilla has the key towards achieving a mass
scale adoption.

Implementing this would most likely at least double the current amount of TOR
users, making this a complete nightmare for the NSA and their associates.

~~~
Amadou
I agree. What Tor needs is basically the same thing that encrypted email needs
- a wide-spread and dead-simple user interface.

If Mozilla were to incorporate a "Tor Browsing Mode" analogous to "Private
Browsing Mode" that "just worked" and didn't leak data, then Tor use would
explode. Even just 0.1% of firefox's userbase would make a huge difference.

~~~
polymatter
or just incorporate Tor into the "Private Browsing Mode" so users don't need
to choose between them. Need a big notice to explain that "Private Browsing
Mode" is now slower, some sites won't work correctly etc. along with the
current notice.

------
Achshar
The only reason why I am not using tor right now is because of it's barrier of
entry. I can probably figure it out, but currently the effort outweighs the
return.

~~~
thelukester
Maybe I'm missing your sarcasm, you place no value in your digital privacy, or
you're just completely computer illiterate. If you're capable of installing
any app on your computer, you can run the tor browser. There is nothing more
involved to it than downloading the tor browser bundle, running the setup
file, and finally click on "Start Tor Browser.exe". My 90 year old grandmother
could figure this out.

~~~
Tloewald
Wow your grandmother rocks.

Aside from all that, if you don't significantly modify your browsing habits,
all you've now done is increase your interestingness to the NSA et al. and
made your browser run slower and use more RAM.

------
glomph
The thing about that is the browser bundle they provide significantly reduces
the number of variables they need to consider when making tor work to secure
privacy. If everyone used it with the default firefox there would be
significant problems for anonymity in terms of browser sniffing.

I think a more helpful move in response to the exploit would be working
towards having tor base their bundle on more up to date versions of firefox.

~~~
doublec
The bundle available at the time included the fix. This post on June 26 says
it's based on Firefox 17.0.7esr.

[https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-
and...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/new-tor-browser-bundles-and-
tor-02414-alpha-packages)

The number of affected users must be due to not upgrading. Does the tor bundle
automatically update?

~~~
DuskStar
I do not believe it does, though the default homepage will alert you if you
are using an outdated version of the browser bundle.

------
betawolf33
A nice idea, but probably not a good one.

The problems Tor would bring users in terms of slow connection, risk from
malicious exit nodes etc. would outweigh any benefit for most people. Combine
this with the fact that to gain anonmyity from Tor you'd need to (at least)
disable JS and session cookies, which many ordinary users will consider to
break their browsing experience, and you'll find that really all this idea
would do is put a lot more load on the Tor network. That's assuming a 'default
on' option.

Perhaps an 'anonymous mode' version of 'private browsing' which switches the
browser to a more secure configuration (like the Tor browser) and proxies
through Tor would mitigate some of these problems.

~~~
slacka
If Mozilla added a "Tor mode", I'm sure it would be configured like the Tor
Browser bundle, ie with both disable JS and session cookies disable along with
all the privacy enhancements. The existing "private browsing mode" hurts the
browsing experience. That's why it's optional for times when you value privacy
over convenience.

If you had noticed from the tweets, it appears that Mozilla has been slow to
adopt Tor's patches.[1][2] Making Tor a supported feature would greatly
alleviate this situation.

[1]
[https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firef...](https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firefox-
patches)

[2]
[https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firef...](https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#firefox-
patches)

------
belorn
A great imitative. Adding Tor support for private mode would only improve it,
and give people a mode where searching for health issues, job advice, or any
other sensitive information can be done private.

Maybe not common knowledge, but if you do search queries of those types, your
ads in Youtube, Google, and other areas are likely to change. Their business
model is to target ads based on previous searches. If you then share the
network with other family members, those ads will pop up on their screens to.

------
lazyjones
That might sound useful, but it would cause a lot of damage:

\- many users would get malware-injected web pages from shady exit nodes (they
would become a much more interesting target for phishing/other malware than
they are now)

\- it would no longer be practical for web sites to block Tor as a defence
against excessive scraping, spam posts, fake reviews (currently most Tor
traffic to "normal" web sites is of that kind)

~~~
hnha
a) would be a great proposition for more ssl and secure dns.

b) as someone who does her mindless random browsing through tor that sounds
wonderful.

------
znowi
I love the idea. Go for it, Mozilla!

If this is implemented:

1\. Firefox, with its insane public reach, can substantially heighten the
awareness of privacy issues.

2\. Government will have to get creative to subdue a highly popular
heavyweight like Mozilla.

And as already mentioned, it might be the _best_ response, as of yet, to the
NSA fallout. It can potentially seriously alter the power balance between the
Big Brother and us, people.

------
untog
A broader issue I've thought about before now is that we might need to
redefine what "incognito" mode is, now. What we have is still relevant- the
always-used "gift shopping" (and the more realistic "porn mode") reasons still
apply. But I worry that "incognito" implies more than it offers- after all,
no-one monitoring your internet connection is going to be meaningfully
affected by it.

What I'd also love to see (but am a little uncertain on how to implement) is
tab isolation for sessions- I don't want the Facebook like button on <x site>
to read my Facebook login on my other tab. Right now I can use incognito
windows and Chrome extensions to achieve that, but it's messy.

~~~
shawnjan8
I use the Chrome Users feature to achieve this - one profile for home, one for
work, and one for Facebook. Works a lot better then incognito mode!

~~~
kudu
I'd love to be able to have profiles/users set at the tab level.

------
AndrewDucker
My only question would be whether Tor could cope with that many users all at
once.

Having it built in, and defaulting to On when you open a private browsing
window would be nice though.

~~~
ckozlowski
It would be a fantastic edition to "private" mode. Also, by being baked into
the browser, it would give Mozilla a degree of control over the protocols
passed. A user opting for the browser plugin instead of the standalone client
would not be passing Bittorrent traffic over the network.

More relays and endpoints would be needed, but I wonder how kind of support
could be gathered if Tor was publicized in such a way.

------
ebbv
Strikes me as obvious pandering. Obviously for 99% of users Tor is more
headache and overhead for no real benefit. Not to mention that most users
would say "Why did my internets get so slow?" and not understand what was
going on.

~~~
rthomas6
I'd assume one would have to manually enable it? At least for non .onion
sites.

~~~
BrendanEich
Yes, you assume correctly -- it would be competitive-browser suicide to turn
on by default. Thinking either that we would do such a thing, or that I'd
pander with such a non-starter (or pander at all, at my age and lack of
political ambition) is just dumb.

What would be smart, which we are looking at: adopting, _supporting_ , and
bundling Tor (opt-in). As I tweeted.

------
recuter
There's no technical support necessary mind, Tor is just another proxy you can
point your browser to with one click.

It is 'support' as in activism in the vain of "Know your rights" first-run
messages Firefox runs, 'etc. It frustrates me when the solutions hacker types
come up with either exclusively revolve around code or are not well thought
out (like this suggestion).

~~~
sp332
It's a lot more complicated. If you send cookies with session information over
Tor, you've basically trashed your anonymity.
[https://www.torproject.org/download/download-
easy.html.en#wa...](https://www.torproject.org/download/download-
easy.html.en#warning)

------
asadotzler
TOR browsing in Firefox is a horrible experience that's so far from usable
that it shouldn't be exposed to any but the most expert of of users who
understand how it actually works and what benefits it brings with its great
cost -- a mostly broken browser.

------
Chirael
I really think Firefox should become the freedom lover's privacy browser;
because it is a non-profit org, it can do what Google/Chrome can't.

------
octatone2
They may want to fix that JS heap spray exploit first in their ESR ...

~~~
blueveek
Tracking bug:
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901365](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901365)

edit: seems to be already fixed in ESR 17.0.7

~~~
riquito
ESR 17.0.7 dated 25 June 2013. How exploiting an old bug on an old version
became a "0 day" is beyond me

~~~
makomk
It took about a day before anyone figured out what exactly the exploit was
doing; I guess all the normal researchers are off at Black Hat without their
usual tools.

------
kishor_gurtu
The TOR browsing experience is terrible and unreliable. If you're really so
concerned, just pony up for a VPN.

~~~
ckozlowski
A VPN is not the same.

A VPN will protect from a MITM attack, obscuring the resources you're
accessing and the data exchanged to an observer. However, it does not
anonymize you from the VPN provider, who can still disclose your information
or be compelled to provide it. (you undoubtedly had to pay for that VPN with a
legal name and payment information.)

Tor not only protects against MITM, but obscures the requester such that if an
interested party can either force information from, or controls the endpoint,
they cannot discover who the requester is.*

(* Provided that the requester is not divulging information in the form of
cookies or other personally identifying information. If Mozilla were serious
about providing native Tor functionality in Firefox, they'd no doubt provide
it as part of the browser "Private" mode.)

Edit: This link doesn't cover VPNs, but gives a good idea of how different
services provide security at different levels. VPNs obscure the "site.com"
along the route, while the location in all locations as shown as the VPN
provider, and not the end user. However, because the VPN provider knows the
identity of the user, it can potentially disclose this info. A Tor endpoint
does not know this. [https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-
https](https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https)

~~~
Sanddancer
Nope. I can walk down to the local (or not local) seven-11/walgreens/etc and
get a disposable credit card for use in paying for my vpn provider, and
provide them that I am Jake Blues and live at 1060 West Addison St, Chicago,
Il.

~~~
clarkm
But credit card companies maintain records of time and place sold, so unless
you travel to a foreign country to make your purchase, you're still leaking
your location.

~~~
Sanddancer
They'll learn those cards were purchased from a Walgreens on Market Street in
San Francisco three months ago. If the clerk even remembers, the purchaser
said something about being dragged to SF for business, and how they really
wish they were back in New York with their kids. In other words, less than
nothing.

