Tails

#10 Updated by intrigeri 2017-06-30 09:45:18

u wrote:
> Today’s situation is different. We’ve removed the “Tor is not ready” notification

Wait, no: this notification is still there (config/chroot_local-includes/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/60-tor-ready.sh).

#11 Updated by Anonymous 2017-06-30 10:01:53

intrigeri wrote:
> u wrote:
> > Today’s situation is different. We’ve removed the “Tor is not ready” notification
>
> Wait, no: this notification is still there (config/chroot_local-includes/etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/60-tor-ready.sh).

Ok, well, I never see this when I start Tails 3.0. Might be that my network is too fast (although it’s not really).

#13 Updated by sajolida 2017-09-06 18:33:55

This was discussed at the September 2017 meeting:

This ticket was originally created as part of Feature #10491 (Redesign the network configuration and startup) and proposed removing this notification once we have something much better. This won’t happen any time soon so the question is still open whether we want to:

• Remove it all the way, even without Feature #10491
• Rephrase it

Random notes from the discussion as no decision was taken:

• This notification currently provides some (maybe not very good)
  feedback that something is going (“Please wait…”) before Tor is
  ready.

• Useless notifications are bad because they train people in ignoring
  them. The utility of this one could be better studied.

• Proposals:
  **Remove this notification and instead improve the notification when
  starting Tor Browser when Tor is not ready yet. Hinting at the onion
  icon in the top bar.
  • Rephrase as “Starting Tor”.

#15 Updated by Anonymous 2017-09-06 20:43:14

sajolida wrote:

> What bothers me with the proposal of removing the notification and relying on an improved Tor Browser popup is that it’s a punishing behavior: if you don’t wait enough (even if you’ve actually never been told to wait!) then you get a pissed off popup telling you that you didn’t wrong and not waited enough.

This sounds not right, indeed, I agree.

> So actually, I would propose to do both proposals:
>
> * Rephrase the current notification to be shorter and more useful. “Starting Tor. Please wait…” as segfault suggested. Maybe adding something to explain that until then it’s impossible to go online. Maybe in there directly teaching about the onion icon with an icon, an animation, etc.

This sounds like a great plan and like a real improvement.

> * Improve the Tor Browser notification to explain basically the same thing again but to different users and behaviors.

Cool!

Thanks for proposing this as incremental change :)

#16 Updated by intrigeri 2017-09-07 10:30:44

Actually, lots of this discussion (and some of sajolida’s reasoning) is based on the erroneous assumption that the Tor status icon turns to “OK” once time has synced, and that Tor Browser will display a warning dialog until the time has been sync’ed. Both are wrong: the Tor status icon turns to “OK” as soon as Tor has bootstrapped, and once this is done Tor Browser won’t display any warning dialog. So most proposals that were made here and on the ticket are buggy. In retrospect, we ought to have checked what the current behavior is before discussing improvements :/

Some more “random” data points that might be useful to the next person who tries to make progress here:

• The current notification only incidentally conveys info about connecting to the Tor network: it’s about trying to do stuff . We actually have no notification about trying to connect to the Tor network.
• As a consequence, (I didn’t test this, I’ve only read the code, sorry) the current failure mode (when Wi-Fi works but the Internet connection is broken) is to close the “Synchronizing the system’s clock” notification and replace it with another one… that essentially dumps the output of htpdate. Here again, we don’t tell the user that we can’t connect to Internet or the Tor network: instead, we tell them that some weird operation that happens to need Internet access failed.
• In many situations, at the very same time we display a Tor status icon that suggests Tor is ready, and then a notification asking users to wait until the time has sync’ed (and finally a notification that says “Tor is ready”). That’s not good. But I bet that diplaying “Starting Tor. Please wait…” while the Tor status icon has already turned to “OK” would confuse users even more by making the mismatch between these 2 messages even larger.
• GNOME doesn’t display notifications when trying to connect to the Internet (but granted, it takes less time than bootstrapping Tor :) In recent GNOME I’ve seen the Wi-Fi/Ethernet icon be animated while NM is connecting to the AP/router/Internet. I find this less obstrusive than notifications, and the animation catches my eye enough for me to realize that “something is going on in the background”.
• If I try to use the Internet with a working AP/router but broken upstream Internet connection on a regular, non-Tails GNOME system, it’s the app’s responsibility to nicely tell me that the connection failed and what I can do about it. IIRC Firefox and Chromium do a sane job at it, but IMO most other apps display crappy technical error messages. So perhaps this design problem could be solved somewhere upstream, rather than in Tails only; I suspect experienced GNOME designers may have useful input. Some distros enable NetworkManager’s connectivity checking (that calls home) as a way to improve this.

The best quick fix I can think of right now is to 1. replace the “Synchronizing the system’s clock” (that doesn’t do what everyone here seems to believe so probably users will get confused as well) with a “Starting Tor…” notification displayed when we start trying to connect to the Tor network, that is replaced with the existing “Tor is ready” notification once Tor has bootstrapped and the clock has been sync’ed; 2. make the Tor status icon turn to “OK” only once the time has sync’ed. So we’ll get the feedback sajolida reasonably wants to display, no more mismatch between the status icon and the notifications, and less low-level technical details users should not be bothered with.

Interestingly, this approach would force us to clean up our semantics a bit both in terms of GUI and backend, which can save us time and headaches when reasoning about the parent ticket :)

(Bonus, and I’m less sure about it: 4. replace the time sync’ing failure notification with one that’s more generally about connecting to Tor; 5. replace the “in progress” notifications with an animated Tor status icon.)

#17 Updated by sajolida 2017-09-08 12:59:45

Full ack on all this and +1 on #5 and the animated Tor status icon!

#26 Updated by sajolida 2019-01-14 14:59:40

A technical friend of mine contacted about how to change time in her Tails. She said it was needed for Tor to function. I understand that synching the time to UTC and at the same time warning people that a good clock is needed for Tor might be very confusing: they might think that the clock in UTC is unsynced. Getting rid of the warning would solve this.