We've been doing it wrong.

indolering
Posts: 801
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Re: We've been doing it wrong.

Post by indolering »

I'm not certain what you mean about NXDOMAIN catches, can you elaborate? Basically what I was envisioning was having the Tun device forward .bit traffic to a local SOCKS proxy (like the proxy part of FreeSpeechMe) via something like Tun2Socks.
Think OpenDNS, when a user types in a non-existent domain OpenDNS returns a Google search results page which offers some suggestions and make money off of the ad revenue.
Automating builds of a "Namecoin browser" is one thing, making sure they're reproducible is something else, because ideally you would need multiple developers running the builds on their own machines. That's difficult to automate. Maybe I'm unaware of something, but I believe even the Tor Browser Bundle is not built automatically.
Well, I don't think we should distribute a Tor Browser Bundle version : )

However, whatever our process, we should just download the binaries from Mozilla proper and then add in our own extension. No need to have a reproducible build there, just check the hash to make sure it matches Mozilla's published hash. : )
DNS is much more than a key->value datastore.

indolering
Posts: 801
Joined: Sun Aug 18, 2013 8:26 pm
os: mac

Re: We've been doing it wrong.

Post by indolering »

Let me back up, some years ago the Tor project announced a contest to build a UI for Vidalia and the Tor button. When it came time to submit my proposal, I basically sent in a picture of a browser screen with a circle around it to indicate a sandbox. This was before sandboxing was all-the-rage and they replied that they just didn't know if my proposal was technically feasible.

I think this was just handwaving: as Jeremy mentioned in another thread, Tor engineers were reluctant to migrate away from the add-on and proxy combination to the Tor Browser Bundle because it increased the complexity of their operations. Fast-forward 8 years and the designer of the Tor add-on wrote a blogpost outlining that things need to just work and that they needed to deliver an all-in-one package. They basically spent 8 years trying unworkable solutions.

Now, it's easy to kvetch from the outside. In retrospect, MOST of my UX critiques of Tor were incorrect. They spent their time focusing on the core security fundamentals of Tor, sacrificing performance in the short-term knowing that Moore's law (or it's shitty linear network equivalent) would fix most of the network speed issues eventually.

They didn't have the engineering capacity to build their own, sandboxed Firefox browser so they made due. However, instead of ignoring the usability requirements, they could have treated it like any other engineering problem. They could have specifically stated, "This is what we need to do to make the product usable for the average person, we don't have that capacity yet." and then saved their engineering resources for a time when they could deliver that product.

Usability is, in many ways, a lot like security. In our situation, it's mostly an all-or-nothing solution. We can't expect people to run their own personal Namecoin servers just so they can browse a few websites. We should double-down on using traditional public-key crypto to provide DNS and REST-based solutions for lite-clients today while aligning resources to getting out a UTXO/SPV/SCIP clients in the future.

Jeremy does great work, he is 100x the programmer and engineer I am; I program mainly so I can demonstrate prototypes. I'm trying to suggest a long-term development roadmap which focuses Jeremy and other "real" developers on core technical problems and frees them up from working on half-way solutions.
DNS is much more than a key->value datastore.

virtual_master
Posts: 541
Joined: Mon May 20, 2013 12:03 pm
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Re: We've been doing it wrong.

Post by virtual_master »

indolering wrote: Well, I don't think we should distribute a Tor Browser Bundle version : )
Not a Tor Browser Bundle but a Namecoin Bundle, which supports .bit resolving to Tor and I2P in the same bundle and all whatever will it support next.
biolizard89 wrote: That's not why the TBB exists. Tor started with a Firefox extension called TorButton, but they were forced to fork Firefox because anonymity features required a Firefox fork. It was not a decision they took lightly.
TBB exists for whatever the people use it even if the creators original purpose was different.
But we can make our own bundle for what we need. This could be based on TBB or could be just something similar.
biolizard89 wrote: In general, it is agreed that a Firefox extension would have been cleaner and more user-friendly.
Hmmm. More cleaner maybe. However in this connection I think especially beginners would have more thrust in a Bundle because they are reading a lot about insecure extensions.
And definitely not more user friendly. It would be maybe more user friendly if only .bit domains must be resolved in a single browser and only to clean IPs. But how about using more browsers and resolving to Tor and to I2P also ? You need to install the extension on each browser(which is supported), Tor and I2P(, Freenet also if implemented), then configure it to work.
I am not sure if now is possible to bring the extension to work with Tor and I2P in the same time because I didn't tried to start both in the same time.
If the user sees that his favorite browser is not supported then he probably gives up but if there is a Bundle then he just installs(or unpacks it by a portable version) because he sees it like a program.
So the sense of a Namecoin Bundle would be much more then just having where to place adds.
Is it not much simple to install a single Bundle then a lot of extensions and programs and then configure to each other ?
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