TorTV 0.2

[jaromil]

TorTV


TorTV is a build of Tor and Privoxy maintained to run these programs on TV devices and set-top boxes, starting with our beloved WDLXTV!

The goal of the project is to let more people run Tor at home to contribute and strengthen its network, as well have an anonymous proxy at hand on the local network since we include also Privoxy, accepting connections on the WDTV IP address on port 8118.

Please note TorTV doesn't aims at proxying video streams via Tor, since the onion routing is not (yet?) efficient enough for the purpose.

This is an early release, this app.bin just entered ALPHA stage of development.

More information and download links on the TorTV website

[recliq]

And again: nice one!

Already playing around with it...

[jaromil]

Hi Recliq thanks :^)

let me know how it goes, logs are in /tmp/tor.log and more data and configurations are saved in a tor/ directory inside your USB.

However it should work right away without touching configurations, you can browse the web using Tor on the WDTV just configuring your browser to use its IP as a proxy, port is 8118

There is one pending problem that I could not solve: the NTP configuration with rdate. Somehow the 'ping' and 'rdate' programs provided by busybox don't work well with pool.ntp.org from my box.
So now the use of NTP server time.ien.it is hard-coded, but considering this app is for anonymity it should be changed some time and randomized a bit....

ciao

[recliq]

I hope I have some time during the weekend to play some more with it and tune it a bit.
First thing I noticed is there is no webend integration, I will add that, so you can at least start/stop tor from webend and see if it is running.

Regarding rdate i have to research a bit, all the NTP related settings should be done before dmaosd is started otherwise if you change the date after dmaosd was started you get a lot of weird behavior...

[b-rad.cc]

Nice little app here.

I noticed this when I saw the front page feature on /. Nice bit of advertising!

as for rdate, ntpdate is the binary used to set system time in WDLXTV.

[jaromil]

yea slashdot was big traffic hey :^)
WDLXTV surely deserves more visibility, you've been doing an awesome work guys! I'll be trying the new firmware release soon BTW.

Recliq: I'm very interested to build integration with the web interface, I've never looked into that side of things.
if you don't find the time for that, you can also point me out to the documentation and I'll learn something new.

ciao

[recliq]

Sure, I think it's all covered in these two wiki pages:
http://wiki.wdlxtv.com/HowToIntergrateApptoWebend
and
http://wiki.wdlxtv.com/WEC

[jaromil]

Just released 0.2 with a very minimal support for a daemon-only webend for now.
There was a critical bugfix with upgrade notice to Tor binaries 0.2.2.35 so I had to pull this out quick.
I'm sorry I couldn't do more and not even test webend code since I don't have a proper testing environment ATM.

Looking forward to your observations, on 1.02.* firmware releases I've experienced freezes on long runs both with this app and another one (hdsync), I'm still wondering what can that be.

Oh and BTW it would be cool as a feature for TorTV to proxy all http browsing over Tor for anonymous torrent browsing for instance, but we'd need a way to exclude streaming video then, since that would be definite overkill for the onion routing Tor network. Ideas?

[mad_ady]

Not sure if wdtv supports it, but regular linuxes can have several routing tables. I think there is a standard way to bind a binary to a specific routing table (something like VRFs, but I don't know exactly how it's done in linux), and this way you could have a routing table with a default route to Tor and the default routing table with a default route to your ISP. You could then start rtorrent bound to the Tor routing table.

I haven't tried any of this but I remember reading about it some time ago.

[jaromil]

Process-wide routing table settings sound like a cool solution for some cases. Interesting indeed!

However, what I aim at is using TorTV for anonymous browsing and searches made by desktop computers on the same LAN: TorTV just acts as a gateway, also useful to circumvent DNS restrictions like thepiratebay being unreachable in some countries, denied by DNS resolution...

In case of bittorrent traffic, just like streaming video and anything else that is too bandwidth intensive, use of Tor's onion routing is discouraged. Here more info on the topic https://blog.torproject.org/blog/bittorrent-over-tor-isnt-good-idea