Try new Torbutton Firefox-plugin

Update: Included another link to the Video. Thanks, Renke!
Just back from 24C3 where I attended Roger Dingledine’s talk about Tor’s further development plans (Torrent to Matroska-Video: Mirror #1, Mirror #2). He also presented the new development-version of Torbutton which is finally usable. The old Torbutton-plugin had several problems: It had the problem that it presented cookies, history and saved passwords from non-Tor-sessions to Tor-sessions which severely spoiled your privacy; the new development-version of Torbutton has a dedicated cookie-jar for Tor-sessionsand lot’s of other features:

• Disable plugins on Tor Usage
• Isolate Dynamic Content to Tor State
• Hook Dangerous Javascript
• Block Password+Form saving during Tor/Non-Tor
• Store Non-Tor cookies in a protected jar
• …and many more features… (complete list on the website)

See this awesome screen shots to get an idea what changed:

Figure 1: Screen shot of Torbutton Preferences: Dynamic Content

Figure 2: Screen shot of Torbutton Preferences: Cookies

So if you press the Torbutton, it totally isolates all the other non-Tor-sessions (though I don’t recommend to use those tabs), improving your privacy. Before this new plugin was available, I used a separated Firefox-profile to use Tor – not needed anymore with Torbutton.

So grab your new copy (direct link to XPI) and have fun!

Privacy in Germany: What’s going on?

This is a meta-posting describing what’s going on in Germany.

Organisations:

German Privacy Foundation (GPF)

The German Privacy Foundation was finally officially established. The GPF thinks everyone has the right for privacy and anonymous communication. Anonymity is one of the fundamental basics to privacy and support human- and citizen’s rights.

It’s goals are to inform and educate about safe communication on the internet, supporting and organising tutorialsfor citizen about those topics.

The GPF is supporting and endorsing the development and deployment of anonymous infrastructure.

The GPF is a non-profit organisation according to the German law.

Contact: Use the Contact-Form.

Privacy Legal Fund (Germany) [PLF]

The Privacy Legal Fund (Germany) is a yet-to-be-founded organisation which will help voluntary operators of anonymisation-services like JAP, Tor, Mixmaster, Entropy, Freenet et al. with their problems with the Feds.

Much like the GPF, they want to promote the useage of privacy-enhancing internet-tools, but puts it’s emphasis on direct action instead of education. In that sense, the GPF and the PLC will be complementary.

The PLF doesn’t have fixed rules yet, they’re still to be defined. The PLF will be a non-profit organisation.

Contact: Contact me using the contact-form in this blog. You may encrypt the message using the PGP-key 0x90DEE171.

Events:

Both, the GPF and the PLF, will meet on the Chaos Communication Congress 24 in Berlin at the 27th-30th of December 2007 in Berlin.

On the 27th the PLF will meet for it’s founding-ceremony.
On the 28th the PLF and the GPF will meet to discuss the cooperation of both organisations.

Roger Dingledine, head of the Tor-project, will attend 24C3 for some talks as well.

Other Events:

There should be a “10 Years GnuPG“-party in Düsseldorf featuring Werner Koch this Thursday; however, no official annoucement was made yet. Still waiting.