My Twitter feed seems to be filled at the moment with tweets about the situation in Iran, particularly the political censorship of access to social networking sites. The general gist of the tweets seems to be that we should all do something to help maintain open internet access… so I wondered what I could do to make a small contribution.
Now, the most popular way to facilitate said access seems to be using TOR. Tor is basically a service that lets you route internet traffic between random nodes across the world, thereby making sites effectively unblockable. Pretty cool, the preferred usage model is installing Firefox / Vidalia / Privoxy and Tor.
Now, this is a bit of a faff, and involves leaving a bunch of stuff on the machine you are using – not ideal. I figured a useful contribution could be using a tool such as the excellent Xenocode Virtual Application Studio to repack the apps such that they run from one EXE and are sandboxed from the machine you are running on. e.g. you can run from a USB stick without leaving traces.
Since I happen to have purchased aforementioned software, I have bundled up Firefox 3.0.11 with the Vidalia software bundle and i’m making it available here for download. Please note that I make NO warranties around this, but it seems to work – feedback is very very much appreciated.
DOWNLOADS IN ZIP FORMAT: (just unzip and run the EXE):
- My Server
- Rapidshare Mirror
After running, click the ENABLE TOR button down the bottom right of Firefox and then visit a site like http://www.showmyip.com to check it’s working!
When you exit, remember to exit the components aside from Firefox (i.e. Tor, Privoxy, Vidalia – would it be better if exiting FF exited them all?)
Finally, note the ‘Sandbox’ directory – this is your custom settings from the session – instead of being saved on the host machine, they’re saved in there, allowing you to persist your settings on, say, a USB stick, between launches.
If it’s useful, spread the word. and your feedback is very welcome!
Cheers,
P
EDIT: This version should now be x64 compatible.