Chat on IRC (irc://irc.oftc.net:6667/tor-dev) with a Tor Browser developer about this bug

tor-browser-chat.log (text/plain), 3.02 KB, created by Alessandro Di Federico on 2012-09-12 00:11:09 UTC

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<ale> hi, could someone give me an opinion about this question regarding Tor browser in Gentoo? https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=434652
<ale> if a developer could answer to the bug it'd be great
<nickm> ale: helix and mikeperry would be the best people to ask about that
<adrelanos> but mike is currently not active on irc
<adrelanos> will he read the log later or will the message be lost?
<ale> nickm, adrelanos, I wrote them an e-mail to all the tor browser commiters, but only Jacob answered
<adrelanos> ok
<ale> if one of you could ping them on this, it'd be awesome
<adrelanos> i can not, i am not close to any of them
<ale> OK, thanks anyway
<mikeperry> I don't know why we chose the build options we did, but using FF13 is a bad idea for many reasons.. you should stick to 10.x-ESR
<adrelanos> great, mike is back
<ale> mikeperry, could you quickly name some of them so I can put them on the bug tracker?
<adrelanos> ale: and what about the tor browser patch set? if they do not include it will be also bad.
<ale> adrelanos, they're included
<adrelanos> ale: by the way having some progress in distro packaging is great!
<mikeperry> FF13 is a rapid release. it is not recieving security updates from Mozilla for one
<ale> adrelanos, it's great if it's done the right way ;)
<mikeperry> that's probably the biggest
<mikeperry> there's also likely subdle anonymity and fingerprinting issues in the difference between FF10.x and FF13
<mikeperry> not to mention I have no idea how you applied the tor browser patches... did you?
<ale> mikeperry, isn't the fact that most users are using firefox esr a good reason to use it? I mean, this should improve anonimity I think
<mikeperry> s/subdle/subtle
<ale> otherwise we're creating a pool of tor browser gentoo users
<mikeperry> yeah, that is the basic reasoning behind the anonymity+fingerprinting issues
<ale> mikeperry, we did, but I think we're applying patches from the tor browser git master, which fit ff 13
<ale> mikeperry, for instance I think it'd be easy to detect webm support
<ale> (which is currently user-configurable in the gentoo tor browser)
<mikeperry> ale: yeah, I would use maint-2.2 branch for your "stable" tbb build.. is this for some kind of alpha series, or the main one?
<ale> mikeperry, currently we don't have a tbb stable build, but I trying to convince it's a good idea to have it
<ale> I think having an alpha ebuild for testing purposes it's good, but to have a good degree of anonimity we should use FF ESR
<ale> mikeperry, OK, I'll copy & paste this discussion on the bug tracker, thanks
<mikeperry> if you want to experiment with build options, --disable-ctypes might break some addons, but it should not be detectable unless the browser is already owned
<ale> usually in Gentoo we like to experiment build options, but I think that in this particular case there are good reasons not to do that
<mikeperry> yeah