[guardian-dev] Orbot as a pure VPN?

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

I think this is a better approach for Tor on Android, given a similar
level of resources to work on it.  If we had a lot more developer and UX
time, I think we could manage it all in a single app.

We should work on getting Tor itself as a library, and then make that
library detect whether Tor is already provided from another trusted app
(e.g. Orbot, Orfox).  When Tor is already provided, then the library
should disable the included Tor and route traffic to the other trusted
Tor app.

.hc

Nathan of Guardian:
> There was a lot of "we need to make tor easier" discussions at the Tor
> dev meeting, in particular thinking about mobile first/only type users.
> One thing I realized is that Orbot today is neither a VPN or a browser,
> and that confuses many users, since it doesn't fit into a neat category.
> For many places in the world, there is a need for a trustworthy, free,
> open-source "unblocking" service. We had reports from trainers in South
> America who said that the current user experience of Orbot was confusing
> for novice users who just wanted to access sites or use apps that were
> blocked.
> 
> So, for my hackathon time for tor dev, I created a new variation on the
> Orbot user experience, called OrbVPN or Orbot VPN. It is a pure VPN
> version of the app with a single "connect" button, that lets the user
> choose which apps to use with Tor, through a grid of app icons. It only
> shows app that have the "internet" permission requested, and that have
> proper names (i.e. not system services). There is no "tor everything"
> option - the user must choose the specific apps they want to "unblock":
> 
> You can find the APK and source here:
> https://github.com/n8fr8/orbotconnect/releases/tag/0.0.1-prototype-1
> t
> The app is also quite small, less than 5 MB. This is because it doesn't
> include any of the root/transproxy code, the polipo http proxy, or the
> obfs4 bridge client. Most of that is still Tor itself (around 3MB), but
> we had additional discussions at the dev meeting about working to make a
> stripped down "client only" build of Tor, that wouldn't include any of
> the more server-oriented functionality.
> 
> It also requires Android 5+, since that is where the VPN API works the
> best, and allows for easy white-listing of apps without hijinks.
> 
> Anyhow, just food for thought, and potentially a future direction. We
> also want to move to having Tor and other native dependencies be
> available as official standalone gradle libs/AARs, to make the
> experimentation, creation and maintenance of these different kinds of
> user experiences around Tor much easier. 
> 
> +n
> 

-- 
PGP fingerprint: EE66 20C7 136B 0D2C 456C  0A4D E9E2 8DEA 00AA 5556
https://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=vindex&search=0xE9E28DEA00AA5556