Temporary Website Outages....are fixed

by phobos | December 21, 2011

Update 2011-12-21 20:06 (GMT-5): everything is back online and operating within acceptable parameters.

As of late last night 20 Dec (GMT-5) our website hosting provider is
experiencing a sustained attack. The attack is not directed at Tor, but
someone else on the same network. The effect is that parts of our
website infrastructure are intermittently unreachable. This includes
the following domains in torproject.org: www, trac, gitweb, doxygen,
cloud, svn, and check.

The most visible outage is check.torproject.org. Every Tor Browser
Bundle user will attempt to reach this url on start up. You are
currently seeing a browser-generated timeout message as the site is
unreachable.

We're working to setup a new instance of check.torproject.org on a
different machine today.

Originally posted to tor-talk, https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2011-December/022457.ht…

Comments

Please note that the comment area below has been archived.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 21, 2011

Permalink

FYI, with each download of the latest English version of the Tor Bundle, I've been getting an AVG alert to a malware insertion as Tor.exe extracts from the compressed download.

"FYI, with each download of the latest English version of the Tor Bundle, I've been getting an AVG alert to a malware insertion as Tor.exe extracts from the compressed download."

Did you use gpg to verify your download was genuine?
Have you uploaded the Tor.exe file to sites like Virus Total for a true test of whether or not a virus is present?

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 21, 2011

Permalink

Another issue has now reared its head: Since the announcement that everything is back online and operating within acceptable parameters, my attempts at downloading the English version of the Tor Browser Bundle is now blocked by an alert indicating that the file cannot be copied.

Me thinks the site has been compromised.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 21, 2011

Permalink

Most of the Tor relays have some variation of "tor" in their domain so going to an IP address checker is an alternative to determine if one is actually on Tor.

One observation: Sometimes Tor behaves really well -- I have instant connects and fast downloads. Why can't it be this way all the time?

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 22, 2011

Permalink

>Sometimes Tor behaves really well -- I have instant connects and fast downloads. Why can't it be this way all the time?

Tor-client select nodes in a circuits at random. Resulting speed is a form of lottery.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

December 23, 2011

Permalink

Are you guys even testing your releases? I swear. The new torbrowser-2.2.35-3 EN-US as well as the torbrowser-2.2.35-2 from yesterday both have broken themes (at least on Windows 7 64bit). None of the aero effects show up at all. Yes this is with a new profile.

Yes, we test them all before release. Unfortunately, there are ten trillion different combinations of user software, operating systems, and the like which make Tor do odd things for people. Sorry you're having problems. Opening a bug ticket will at least get the issue on the todo list.

Anonymous (not verified) said:

January 09, 2012

Permalink

I am no longer able to connect to Tor at all. I just get an infinite message in Vidalia Control Panel "connecting to Tor" and the progress bar stalls at about 1/10 of the way across. Yesterday I experienced the problem connecting to check.torproject when I started up my system, but I was still able to connect to the network and become a relay. Not sure whether the attack you're describing could cause this. I use it very little for my own traffic and am primarily on Tor to provide a service to others. But I do run it whenever I'm on my main system. Good luck with the problems. Thanks.