Tor Browser

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Tor browser.

That's another thing that I noticed on these pictures.

He's using Tor Browser, which is a browser that is designed to keep you anonymous.

Nobody uses that unless they're up to something weird, right? Buying drugs, hiring a hitman,

looking at child porn.

Nobody uses that unless they're up to no good.

The fact that this guy, by the way, who I don't know how old Jim Thornton is.

None of it makes any sense.

Also, the redundancy of they're like, oh, they're using a Tor browser and then the Onion Router.

I'm like, Tor browser stands for the Onion Router, you fucking idiots.

That's what Tor stands for.

But I didn't know that.

But also, like, why? Why would you have a Tor browser on your phone live streaming your friend's apartment unless you were planning on making, like, a sex tape, right? Like, unless you were, like, going to take this girl back, fuck her, and then sell it online.

But either way, if that's the case, don't drop your phone.

Well, I think what we're going to find out, then, is, like, the owner of the place is, like, a murderer or a rapist.

But even then, in the iOS app store, for example, this doesn't actually seem to cleanly apply to any open source apps.

Like if I run Brave Browser, if I run Tor Browser, technically they still seem, again, based on my read of this bill, they still have to technically accept this age bracket signal from the operating system.

So if they ignore it, like what happens? Is there any kind of side effect if they do that? So these are the things that I'm asking and wondering about.

Of course, I'm not a legal expert, but they're just things that I've kind of noticed as I've been reading through this coverage and looking through the bills.

So really good update, and make sure to update any of your Firefox installations if you need to.

Next up, Tails, the anonymous operating system, I guess ephemeral anonymous operating system, however you want to refer to it, hit version 7.12. And Firefox is moving to a two-week release cadence as well.

And so Tor Browser and Tails are doing the same.

And Tails 7.12 is the first release on that new cadence.

Mm.

Anonymity is this idea that I can go to any website or use any app and they, nobody will know who I am, right? And that's a whole other stack of user interface and app and brow- Tor browser, which is separate from...

So the history really is that there was this really important idea to, like, let's make the internet more secure, and it had this weird side effect-

Yeah

...

in a matter of years.

And so then EFF really was a big supporter, and then Tor became its own nonprofit, and has really matured in so many ways to both not only continuing to ship Tor Browser as a premier- Browser open source built on Firefox, thing you can trust.

Right.

You can kind of just tell all of these GPUs process the data very slightly differently, and you can get some information about that.

Um, however, all of this additional randomization is always a, a good thing, and it's good that Brave continues to work on this because, I mean, their, their approach is definitely different than what we see, uh, like Firefox and, and Tor Browser do.

They...

Brave does more randomization stuff, uh, and there's pros and cons to both approaches, but, uh, Brave definitely is a lot more user-friendly than some of the, uh, more locked down configurations of Firefox, I would say.

I think the biggest thing that I think Brave does that separates them a little bit from, like, the Firefox forks and the Firefox developers is that they kind of try, at least, they at least try to keep functionality.

Yeah.

Whereas I feel like a lot of stuff with Firefox, especially with, you know, Mullvad Browser and Tor Browser, basically everything that can fingerprint you is disabled, which I guess makes sense 'cause you're limiting...

That's just completely removing a entire data point, right? But, like, also, people need to use the internet and-

All right, everybody, and now we are in the final little bit of the podcast here, which is the open source news.

So we have Tor Browser, which is the anonymity, privacy-focused browser, and they released version 15.0.20. There's a full changelog if you wanna see it.

It seems like mostly security updates and minor fixes.

Waterfox is a Firefox fork.

Don't spend hours tweaking obscure browser flags or piling on privacy extensions.

If your threat model demands stateless anonymity, use browsers engineered specifically around herd immunity, like the Mulvad browser or the Tor browser.

These browsers lock your window dimensions to standard increments, spoof system fonts, and force your canvas and web audio outputs to return identical mathematical values across every single user in their network.

You hide by looking exactly like a million other people.