New Feature: Tor Interpreter

by atagar | May 26, 2014

Hi all, after a couple months down in the engine room I'm delighted to announce a new Stem feature for advanced Tor users and developers!

Stem's Interpreter Tutoral

The control interpreter is a new method for interacting with Tor's control interface that combines an interactive python interpreter with raw access similar to telnet. This adds several usability features, such as...

  • Irc-style commands like '/help'.
  • Tab completion for Tor's controller commands.
  • History scrollback by pressing up/down.
  • Transparently handles Tor authentication at startup.
  • Colorized output for improved readability.

This is the last major feature going into the Stem's 1.2.0 release, which is coming out later this month. Until then you can easily give it a whirl with...

% git clone https://git.torproject.org/stem.git
% cd stem
% ./tor-prompt

Running into an issue? Got a feature request? As always feedback appreciated! -Damian

Comments

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Anonymous (not verified) said:

May 26, 2014

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We have some questions for you Damian:

1. Are you working for the NSA?

2. Have you ever been approached by the NSA to insert backdoors in your software? (You can give a verbal "yes" with a shaking of the head to signify "no")

3. Are there backdoors in the Stem's interpreter for the NSA to make use of?

[[Edit: I spent a while trying to figure out if I should moderate this comment from an anonymous user or what -- but I decided to let it go through intact. Note that the real Damian answers below, and this is some person trolling you. But hey, make up your own mind. :) --Roger]]

>1. Are you working for the NSA?
Yes.

>2. Have you ever been approached by the NSA to insert backdoors in your software? ?(You can give a verbal "yes" with a shaking of the head to signify "no")
Yes and we have.

>3. Are there backdoors in the Stem's interpreter for the NSA to make use of?
Of course.

For all three questions the answer is nope. On a side note the interpreter is a pretty small codebase so it would be easy to audit if you're really that concerned.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

May 26, 2014

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A lot of time the my TBB is too slowly than it should be, here is a trick.

First you get the Vidalia standalone (me downloads i686), then you can see the connection and the status in Tor Network Map. If you feel the network slowly than it should be, delete the related connection (maybe named node or relay) from the Tor Network Map. Now you can see some nodes status is new, if 1 second later it is still new, delete it. If you see the nodes status is building...The new node will build and may help you visited the internet. If not, keep deleting and refreshing your Firefox ( yes, some times deleting the node will make your browser stop connecting to internet) until you the traffic in Tor Bandwidth Usage is not zero.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

May 30, 2014

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Can SOMEONE from the torproject PLEASE REMOVE Startpage.com and Ixquick.com as the STANDARD Search Engine???

They LOG STUFF ABOUT YOU! So the OTHER DAY Im using TOR with a GERMAN IP. Just Searched for "DEPRESSION" on IXQUICK. Guess what result I got first? www.depression-grind.de (NON-sponsored-site) - A GERMAN WEBSITE. I CHANGED the IP addres (New IDENTITY Button). Search for DEPRESSION again. FIRST RESULT is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT!!!!!!!

THEY...LOG...YOUR...COUNTRY...AND...PROBABLY...IP...TOO

If you're using Tor, they don't get your country or your IP address. That's one of the many goals of Tor.

More broadly though, we're running pretty low on search engines that don't suck and that don't make it really tough to interact with them over Tor. Maybe we've run out entirely, in fact, if we want to achieve both of those properties.