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Tor Browser on OpenBSD Update

316 words by attila written on 2017-05-30, last edit: 2017-05-30, tags: open-source, openbsd, pets, ports, tor, tor-browser ⋔ Previous post: Why I Am Called Attila ⋔ Next post: Heavy Seas

I never posted properly here on this subject, so here goes, belatedly: the Tor Browser ports the Tor/BSD Diversity Project worked on out of tree for a year and a half were accepted into the ports tree in November 2016. I made a short post on the torbsd blog, but it's time for another update.

For starters, I still haven't gotten cracking on Pluggable Transports. There's been little time in my life to dig into it, but it's still the next big thing that has to happen. We recently updated the ports to 6.5.2, but didn't make the cutoff date for the OpenBSD 6.1 release. If you install tor-browser on that version of OpenBSD by doing:

$ doas pkg_add tor-browser

you will get Tor Browser 6.5.

To rectify this situation I recently posted a patch to ports@ to backport the 6.5.2 update to OpenBSD 6.1. Hopefully this will happen sometime soon, so OpenBSD 6.1-stable users can have the latest Tor Browser. I intend to carry on doing this as updates come out, since pretty much every Tor Browser update can be considered a critical/security update.

For what it's worth, I highly recommend the -stable update service provided by M:Tier. M:Tier is run by OpenBSD developers and does some really cool shit. I use the free service on my machine at NYI via their shell script. When I have a few shekels I'll pay for a subscription. I've asked them and they said they are willing to produce updated packages for Tor Browser ports on the -stable release. Perhaps TDP can find a way to donate some HW or otherwise support them.

If you run -current then you can follow along as the ports are updated. This is how I use Tor Browser.