We have good and bad news…
Bad News
The next TorBox release (v.0.3.3 or v.0.4.0) will probably not be published before the end of March 2021. The reason is that, currently, we travel around and test TorBox in real-world use. The drawn lessons learned will be implemented in the next releases. At the same time, as bandwidth spoiled freaks, we realized that in some places in the world the Internet connections are suicidally slow. This makes a release during our trip pretty much impossible.
Good News
If you have TorBox 0.3.2, you don’t need to wait to update the base system or the Tor version on your TorBox. First, choose entry 1 in the Update and Reset submenu to update your base system (to Linux Kernel 5.4.83). However, this will not update Tor because, for whatever reason, the Tor Project repository doesn’t support armhf anymore. To update Tor, choose entry 3 in the Update and Reset submenu. This will update Tor to the version 0.4.4.6. This version has an improved guard selection algorithms, adds v3 onion balance support and includes fixes for TROVE-2020-005.
Travelling around, we expired in some countries a wrong DNS resolution regarding torproject.org. Probably, this is a kind of cheap censorship mechanism. This is why we added to our update script a set of open name servers. In other words, if entry 3 in the Update and Reset submenu produce an error and refuse to update Tor, try first entry 4, leave the Update and Reset submenu (it has to be reloaded) and try entry 3 again. In the next TorBox version, these set of open name servers will be installed as default. Important: these open name servers are only used for the DNS requests directly from the command prompt of the TorBox (during installations, updates, administrative work etc.), but not by the clients. Clients DNS requests are resolved through Tor.
We are working hard to replace wicd with our own lightweight wireless manager for TorBox v.0.4.0. The main reason is that it seems that wicd is not developed further. Several attempts to contact the developers went unanswered. The current version of wicd doesn’t support Python version 3, which produces some headaches under Ubuntu. At the same time, however, it is also an opportunity to significantly simplify the handling of wireless networks in TorBox.
