Torpark: More GFW Tinkering?
I know I’ve been a bit heavy on the China internet censorship thing for the past five posts or so, but I just keep bumping into it lately. Today I tried downloading Torpark, an application that runs from a USB thumbdrive and “launches a Tor circuit connection, which creates an encrypted tunnel from your computer indirectly to a Tor exit computer, allowing you to surf the internet anonymously,” and kept on getting re-directed to Google. Finally I realised that the problem most likely was not with the mirror hosting the Torpark file, but rather with my internet connection. I switched to Firefox, fired up Tor and bam, it worked. Not a good sign. I downloaded Torpark a couple months ago fine without being re-directed to Google and having to go through Tor.
December 8, 2006 at 7:03 pm
I actually got Torpark working (having failed the few other times I tried playing around with it over the past few months). I have to wait about two minutes while it loads and tries to connect to a Tor circuit, and if it fails to connect to a Tor circuit I have to start waiting all over again, but it works very well once it’s up and running. Also, the default settings on Torpark are more secure than those on the vanilla Firefox. Furthermore, Torpark comes with some pretty cool preinstalled extensions – I liked one in particular that lets users switch between language menus called Quick Locale Switcher. Since I sometimes use my wife’s Dell, it’s nice to be able to switch languages so easily. I was using a .bat file before.
December 26, 2006 at 4:17 pm
[...] Why hasn’t Tor been blocked? Why can I download Tor? Why can I access the Torpark website but not download Torpark? Why is the main Psiphon website blocked? Why aren’t web-based proxy services like Anonymouse and Proxzee blocked? [...]