On Sun, Sep 21, 2014 at 04:12:00PM +0200, Fabio Pietrosanti (naif) wrote:
Hi all,
for a very interesting deployment of GlobaLeaks in the are of Human Rights defense, we will have the need to distribute a customized Tor Browser Bundle to the sources.
The "customization" requirement is simple: Have as a default home-page the GlobaLeaks .onion site .
We must go that way because:
- the "target country" where the sources are cannot download TBB due to
torproject.org being censored
- the sources are absolutely non-technologically savy (average 60yo
lawyers doing human rights defense)
The website where there will be the leaking instructions and the download of such custom TBB will be "privately distributed" trough word of mouth and trusted connections, with no public solicitation.
So we must do some piece of software that will:
- Download TBB in specific languages (2-3 specific languages) for each
platform
- Unpack TBB (in all formats for Windows, OSX, Linux)
- Apply the customization (set the home-page, with slightly different
parameters depending on the language)
- Check periodically if a new version is available and, in that case,
re-execute the process described above to release updated version of TBB
The questions are: a) Which is a simple/stable/resilient way to check which is the latest version of TBB b) Does someone have already done that kind of customization-process? c) Can everything be done from Linux, like a cron-job, in a fully automatic way? d) Which other customization / ideas / concern are there regarding this process?
I'd personally love if the customization would enable me to completely disable the "URL Bar" and all of the Browser Button in order to make it useful only to use it as a console to send information being a source, without the possibility to go browse other sites.
Waiting for comments before writing some quick specs
If I remember correctly I heard some GlobaLeaks people discussing the idea of rebranding TBB a long time ago but eventually they concluded that it was generally undesirable for potential whistleblowers to have GlobaLeaks-specific bytes sitting around on their storage devices.
Also, it seems like whatever private distribution mechanism you plan to use for a modified TBB could also be used just as well for a standard TBB, or Tails.
Have you considered just distributing Tails USB sticks along with the .onion address on a piece of paper?
As for a TBB updater, until TBB's own updater is released, for GNU/Linux users there is Tor Browser Launcher: https://github.com/micahflee/torbrowser-launcher
Unfortunately I'm not aware of anything similar for Mac or Windows. Tails' incremental upgrader generally works these days, if you have enough RAM and a good clock battery.
~leif