TorBox v.0.2.5 released, featuring Bridge Relay support!

Almost a month ago, the Tor Project called for support:

We currently have approximately 1,000 bridges, 600 of which support the obfs4 obfuscation protocol. Unfortunately, these numbers have been stagnant for a while. It’s not enough to have many bridges: eventually, all of them could find themselves in block lists. We therefore need a constant trickle of new bridges that aren’t blocked anywhere yet. This is where we need your help. By setting up an obfs4 bridge, you can help censored users connect to the open internet through Tor.

Based on this call we put a bridge relay into the net a week ago, and – if everything works out – we will add a second one. However, that was not enough for us. Mostly during the last few weekends, we’ve implemented a TorBox feature that allows anyone with a public IP address, 24/7 internet connectivity over a long time, and a bandwidth of at least 1 Mbps to configure their bridge relay at the touch of a button and put it on the net. Besides, we have added and improved some other details, so that we can now release the resulting image as TorBox v.0.2.5. Below are the corresponding links (typically, you need only the image file):

Main Menu TorBox v.0.2.5
Main Menu TorBox v.0.2.5

Changelog v.0.2.4-rpi4 (08.08.2019) —> v.0.2.5 (24.09.2019)
New: This version introduces the support for setting up a bridge relay.
Updated : The system is based on Raspbian “Buster” lite with Linux Kernel 4.19.66 and Tor version 0.4.1.5.
New: A little message (“TOR is working“) in the right corner of the main menu shows you immediately if you are connected with the Tor network (meaning https://check.torproject.org returns a positive result). Since a missing response does not automatically mean that there is no connection to the Tor network, no error message is displayed. In other words, if this message is missing, there may or may not be a connection problem.
New: We use the same method as mentioned above for the final message box after selecting (or changing) a connection (main menu entry 6-11). In case of success, the message starts with “CONGRATULATION !!” otherwise with “HMMM… THAT DOESN’T LOOK GOOD…“. In contrast to the positive message, negative feedback does not necessarily mean that an error has occurred. Since the check does not last more than 5 seconds, Tor may not have been ready yet; the check site may have been down, etc.
New: Support for Adafruit’s PiTFT displays (PiTFT 3.5″ resistive touch 320×480, PiTFT 2.8“ capacitive touch 240×320, PiTFT 2.4″, 2.8″ or 3.2″ resistive 240×320, PiTFT 2.2″ no touch 240×320, Braincraft 1.54″ display 240×240). Note: TorBox’s menus and dialog boxes have only been adapted for the PiTFT 3.5 (320×480) or any other display, which displays in textual mode at least 25×80 characters.
Improved: Menus and dialog boxes should now work more smoothly on 25×80 textual screens as well as on smartphone and tablet clients. For that reason, we added for some message boxes scroll texts, which are visible with the “scroll down” remark in the title of the message box.
Improved: Revised version of the Tor reset functionality in the „Countermeasure & Troubleshooting“ menu.
Improved: Cleaning up in the shell scripts (used more variables, combine certain parts into functions, etc.).
Updated: Pre-configured Bridges (we also added our bridge relay)
Fixed: While adding bridges, TorBox activates/deactivates the new bridges depending on the current bridge modus.
Fixed: Some more non-critical bugs and typos in the text files.

The pre-v.0.2.6 release is expected at the end of the year.

TorBox v.0.2.4-rpi4 released, featuring Raspberry Pi 4 Model B support!

I’m pleased to announce this new version of TorBox, which introduces the support for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. The image file was completely rebuilt based on Raspbian “Buster” lite with the Linux Kernel 4.19.58 and Tor version 0.4.0.5. This version does support not only the new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B but also the previous Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B / Model B+).

In contrast to the previous versions, the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has a higher power consumption, which is why we also recommend the use of a Pimoroni’s chunky heatsink in combination with a Pibow Coupé 4 case (see photo above).

The TorBox pre-v.0.2.5 release is expected at the end of the year.

TorBox v.0.2.4 released, featuring OBFS4 Bridges support!

I’m pleased to announce the release of TorBox v.0.2.4. As promised, the focus of this release was on supporting OBFS4 bridges, which help to overcome censorship measures in certain countries (for example Turkey). Below are the links for the latest TorBox v.0.24 (typically, you need only the image-file):

Main Menu TorBox v.0.2.4
Main Menu TorBox v.0.2.4

Changelog v.0.2.3 (09.02.2019) —> v.0.2.4 (25.05.2019)
Updated: The system is based on Raspbian “Stretch” lite with Linux Kernel 4.19.2 and Tor version 0.3.5.8.
New: Instead of the “advanced submenu”, we split old and new functionalities into two separate submenus: “countermeasures & troubleshooting” and “configuration & update”.
New: We implemented in the “countermeasures & troubleshooting” submenu a user-friendly way to activate, configure, and change the OBFS4 bridge’s functionality. There are 15 pre-configured OBFS4 bridges in the configuration, which were fully functional at the time of the release. We hope to help with this approach beginners. We urgently need your feedback to develop this functionality further.
New: Since TorBox v.0.2.3, nyx does a good job as a statistics tool (main menu entry 1). However, there are certain cases, when Tor hangs during bootstrap, that nyx doesn’t start either. Therefore we have added an alternative method in the submenu “countermeasures & troubleshooting” (entry 11) to quickly display the log file of Tor and update the display if necessary.
New: TorBox is now providing a SOCKS v5 proxy functionality on port 9050 to its connected clients. If you use that capability, applications which support SOCKS v5 proxy connectivity and “DNS over proxy” (for example Firefox or the add-on FoxyProxy) can access directly .onion sites. For more information, see here.
Improved: We again reduced the size of the image file, which is now about 865 Mbyte.
Changed: All scripts are now executed by bash instead of sh. The change was needed to enable the handling with arrays.
Fixed: Some minor bugs and cleaned up the code.
Removed: The experimental section (for now).

The pre-v.0.2.5 release is expected at the end of the year.

TorBox on GitHub / Updated TorBox v.0.2.3 GitHub release

TorBox has now its own GitHub page, which gives you an easy way to contribute to the TorBox project. Especially for that occasion, TorBox v.0.2.3 has been updated. Here are the links for the latest TorBox v.0.23 (usually, you need only the image-file):

Changelog v.0.2.3 (09.01.2019) —> v.0.2.3 (09.02.2019)

  • Updated: The system is based on Raspbian “Stretch” lite with Linux Kernel 4.14.79 and Tor version 0.3.5.7.
  • Updated: nyx (the Tor statistics program) from version 2.0.4 to 2.1.0.
  • Updated: Reduced logging is now enabled by default. Corresponding menu entry in the advanced menu let you change the amount of logging.
  • Updated: “Erase all log files” (entry in the advanced menu) deletes all log files (previous behavior was to reduce them to 0 bytes).
  • Minor fix: Fixed some minor bugs, cleaned up the code and especially the configuration files in “/etc“.
  • Removed: The Screen Saver (entry in the main menu) and slurm.

The pre-v.0.2.4 release is expected at the end of May 2019 and will focus on improved usability of bridges.