Package and advertise flash proxy
(Re-used text from David Fifield for this ticket description.)
The flash proxy system seems to work pretty well. It has no users because we haven't packaged it or advertised it. We should move that forward by working on the following tasks:
- Make the client transport plugin a managed proxy (#7016 (closed)), so that users don't have to start the client plugin program manually.
- Extend Vidalia to set the necessary torrc option(s) for using the flash proxy client. (We should find out which option(s) there are, and create a new ticket for it.)
- Make TBBs with Tor 0.2.3.2-alpha or higher for pluggable transports support. The flash proxy client runs on GNU/Linus and OS X. It should run on Windows too, but there's a recent bug report (#7147 (closed)) that says that it doesn't. The flash proxy client is not doing anything fundamentally non-portable though. There are no binary packages for the flash proxy client (py2exe or pyinstaller), but it relies on the M2Crypto library, which doesn't come standard with Python, for the secure email-based rendezvous. We might be able to make a pyinstaller package without difficulty that includes M2Crypto.
- Make the server transport plugin a managed proxy (#5575 (closed)), so that Tor can collect statistics on flash proxy usage.
- Deploy a Tor Project-operated facilitator, so that people can stop worrying what bamsoftware.com is and why the flash proxy JavaScript connects to it (#7159 (closed)). The facilitator doesn't need to be a super-trusted entity, we can have more than one in order to diffuse trust. David wouldn't mind running the facilitator running on a torproject.org machine.
- Put an opt-in-only flash proxy page on torproject.org, one with a memorable URL that people can easily type in. Promoting such a page could be a good way to get people to opt in, and also be a convenient place for news sites to link to if the project gets attention.