Tracking usage without tracking people

 Posted on June 8, 2017  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

One thing that has become very clear over the past years is that there is a lot of value in data about people. Of course, the most well known examples these days are advertising and spy agencies, but tracking data is useful for many more things. For example, when trying to build software that is intuitive and easy to use, having real data about how people are using the software can make a massive difference when developers and designers are working on improving their software. [Read More]
Apache  bazaar  Clean Insights  data  F-Droid  fdroid  metadata  nginx  privacy  tor  tracking 

Orfox 1.2: An Overdue Update to Our Privacy-Focused Browser!

 Posted on September 25, 2016  |  n8fr8

Primarily this release is the first in a long while after improving our ability to stay up-to-date with core Tor Browser development. In addition, as Mozilla adds more and more features to the core Firefox, we must review them for any issues related to increased permission request, access to data, and privacy and network leaks. This is a slow, tedious job, so thank you for your patience. We expect to have more frequent, regular releases moving forward. [Read More]

HOWTO: get all your Debian packages via Tor Onion Services

 Posted on July 31, 2016  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

Following up on some privacy leaks that we looked into a while back, there are now official Debian Tor Onion Services for getting software packages and security updates, thanks to the Debian Sys Admin team. This is important for high risk use cases like TAILS covers, but also it is useful to make it more difficult to do some kinds of targeted attacks against high-security servers. The default Debian and Ubuntu package servers use plain HTTP with unencrypted connections. [Read More]
anonymity  debian  distribution  howto  metadata  privacy  security  tor  tor hidden service  tor onion service 

Copperhead, Guardian Project and F-Droid Partner to Build Open, Verifiably Secure Mobile Ecosystem

 Posted on March 28, 2016  |  n8fr8

Three open-source projects haved joined together to announce a new partnership to create an open, verifiably secure mobile ecosystem of software, services and hardware. Led by the work of the Toronto-based CopperheadOS team on securing the core Android OS, Guardian Project and F-Droid have joined in to partner on envisioning and developing a full mobile ecosystem. The goal is to create a solution that can be verifiably trusted from the operating system, through the network and network services, all the way up to the app stores and apps themselves. [Read More]
copperhead  encryption  operating system  partnership 

Orfox: Aspiring to bring Tor Browser to Android

 Posted on June 30, 2015  |  n8fr8

Update 24 September, 2015: Orfox BETA is now on Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.guardianproject.orfox  In the summer of 2014 (https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2014-August/003717.html{.external}), we announced that the results of work by Amogh Pradeep (https://github.com/amoghbl1{.external}), our 2014 Google Summer of Code student, has proven we could build Firefox for Android with some of the settings and configurations from the Tor Browser desktop software. We called this app Orfox, in homage to Orbot and our current Orweb browser. [Read More]
browser  pets2015  privacys  secure  tor 

2015 is the Year of Bore-Sec

 Posted on January 2, 2015  |  n8fr8

Over the last few months, the Guardian Project team has been thinking about how to approach the next five years of our work. An idea of “security so easy and seamless, that it is boring” came to the surface through some discussions. This led us to look for inspiration in important inventions and innovations of the past, that provide safety and security to all on a day-to-day basis, without the users of these technologies hardly thinking about them. [Read More]

Recent news on Orweb flaws

 Posted on June 30, 2014  |  n8fr8

August 2014: New browser development news here, including Orfox, our Firefox-based browser solution: https://lists.mayfirst.org/pipermail/guardian-dev/2014-August/003717.html  On Saturday, a new post was relased by Xordern entitled IP Leakage of Mobile Tor Browsers. As the title says, the post documents flaws in mobile browser apps, such as Orweb and Onion Browser, both which automatically route communication traffic over Tor. While we appreciate the care the author has taken, he does make the mistake of using the term “security” to lump together the need for total anonymity up with the needs of anti-censorship, anti-surveillance, circumvention and local device privacy. [Read More]

Eric Schmidt Awards Guardian Project a “New Digital Age” Grant

 Posted on March 10, 2014  |  n8fr8

An interesting turn of events (which we are very grateful for!) ** FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Diana Del Olmo, diana@guardianproject.info Nathan Freitas (in Austin / SXSW) +1.718.569.7272 nathan@guardianproject.info Get press kit and more at: https://guardianproject.info/press Permalink: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kI6dV6nPSd1z3MkxSTMRT8P9DcFQ9uOiNFcUlGTjjXA/edit?usp=sharing GOOGLE EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN ERIC SCHMIDT AWARDS GUARDIAN PROJECT A “NEW DIGITAL AGE” GRANT The Guardian Project is amongst the 10 chosen grantee organizations to be awarded a $100,000 digital age grant due to its extensive work creating open source software to help citizens overcome government-sponsored censorship. [Read More]

Issues when distributing software

 Posted on October 31, 2013  |  Hans-Christoph Steiner

There is currently a discussion underway on the Debian-security list about adding TLS and Tor functionality to the official repositories (repos) of Debian packages that is highlighting how we need to update how we think about the risks when distributing software. Mostly, we are used to thinking about making sure that the software that the user is installing is the same exact software that has been posted for distribution. This is generally handled by signing the software package, then verifying that signature on the user’s machine. [Read More]
anonymity  bazaar  debian  distribution  encryption  privacy  security  tor