<p>A Tor package updater and runner as an I2P Plugin. This plugin is usable on Windows, Linux, and OSX, as is the freestanding binary. This also functions as a freestanding update for the Tor Browser Bundle and is capable of configuring Tor Browser from the terminal and updating it without running it, should the user choose to operate this way.</p>
<p>This project explicitly views I2P and Tor as complementary privacy tools and explores good ways of combining them in a user-facing tool. It is especially useful when combined with a SOCKS Outproxy plugin like the one written by zzz. You can obtain it within I2P: http://zzz.i2p/topics/3219</p>
<p>See <ahref="USAGE.md">Usage</a> for command-line usage. When used from the Terminal, it acts as a cross-platform Tor Browser installer and wrapper, which adds non-Tor specific options.</p>
<p>Other systems are not targeted and should use a Tor binary built from source, provided by TPO or, their prefered package management system and not this plugin. The plugin will not start a Tor instance if a SOCKS proxy is open on port 9050.</p>
<h4id="optional-features-i-might-add-if-there-is-interestnot-much-stopping-me">Optional Features I might add if there is interest(Not much stopping me…):</h4>
<h3id="usage-as-a-library">Usage as a Library</h3>
<p><ahref="https://pkg.go.dev/i2pgit.org/idk/i2p.plugins.tor-manager">More information at the GoDoc</a></p>
<p>This is also useful as a library for downloading a Tor Browser Bundle. This API isn’t really stable, more “stabilizing.” Feel free to use it, but it may still change a little.</p>
<p>i2p.plugins.tor-manager is in many ways a clone of Tor Browser Launcher by Micah Lee, it reproduces all of TBL’s functionality for downloading, verifying, and running Tor Browser. In particular Micah’s project deserves credit for the AppArmor profiles, which were used in the apparmor profile generator functionality and will probably continue to be the upstream example which I use in my code. Micah’s also already got a PPA, a FlatPak, a Snap, an <code>.rpm</code> and a bunch of other stuff that provides, through packaging, a better way to deal with updates to his software and a better way to deal with the supply chain for many users. There is no reason that <code>i2p.plugins.tor-manager</code> cannot do this, in fact it’s easier for us than it is for Micah, but this project is about a month and a half old and his is several years old. I haven’t done a bunch of packages yet.</p>
<p>Improvements on Tor Browser Launcher include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Does not require GPG to be in the <code>$PATH</code> or on the system at all</li>
<li>Capable of managing a long-running Tor service without also running the Tor Browser</li>
<li>Works everywhere Tor Browser does, not just Linux. Including: Linux, Mac, Windows, AMD64, X86, and M1</li>
<li>Embeds all required resources into a single binary which unpacks itself to a directory of the user’s choice. Never touches any other directory(in ~/.cache or ~/.local, etc), unless specifically instructed to.</li>
<p>Things Tor Browser Launcher does that this does not(yet):</p>
<ul>
<li>Micah went to far greater effort to assure that TPO’s HTTPS certificate was authentic and avoid the Certificate Authority/PKI system. As a result, CA’s are untrusted entities when downloading from the default Tor Project site. This is probably a pretty good idea.</li>
<li>This application does not offer a choice of downloading Tor Browser over the clearnet if there is literally any other option available to it. This is roughly equivalent to downloading Tor Browser over system Tor being always on in Tor Browser Launcher.</li>
<li>This application does not play dial-up noises.</li>
<p>tb-updater is generally only useful on Linux systems and especially Debian-based systems, and only recieves serious testing within the Whonix system itself. It’s a highly specialized tool in some ways, depending on packages which must be installed and repositories which must be configured. For their purposes, this is probably a good thing, Whonix’s raison d’etre is to carefully configure every aspect of their system to be as anonymous and secure as possible, and their approach deals with supply-chain issues which <code>i2p.plugins.tor-manager</code> can only deal with in <strong>packaging</strong> and not by adding features to the launcher itself. Therefore, while most of the improvements on Tor Browser Launcher also apply to TB-Updater, the <code>i2p.plugins.tor-manager</code> and <code>tb-launcher</code> are actually less directly comparable.</p>
<p><ahref="https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/garlic"title="garlic icons">Garlic icons created by Icongeek26 - Flaticon</a><ahref="https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/onion"title="onion icons">Onion icons created by Freepik - Flaticon</a><ahref="https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/search"title="search icons">Search icons created by Freepik - Flaticon</a><ahref="https://www.flaticon.com/free-icons/offline"title="offline icons">Offline icons created by Flat Icons - Flaticon</a></p>
