Tor Browser 9.5a5 released: fixes a critical security issue in Firefox
3 min readWhy do you use Tor?
Protect their privacy from unscrupulous marketers and identity thieves.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) sell your Internet browsing records to marketers or anyone else willing to pay for it. ISPs typically say that they anonymize the data by not providing personally identifiable information, but this has proven incorrect. A full record of every site you visit, the text of every search you perform, and potentially userid and even password information can still be part of this data. In addition to your ISP, the websites (and search engines) you visit have their own logs, containing the same or more information.
Protect their communications from irresponsible corporations.
All over the Internet, Tor is being recommended to people newly concerned about their privacy in the face of increasing breaches and betrayals of private data. From lost backup tapes to giving away the data to researchers, your data is often not well protected by those you are supposed to trust to keep it safe.
Protect their children online.
You’ve told your kids they shouldn’t share personally identifying information online, but they may be sharing their location simply by not concealing their IP address. Increasingly, IP addresses can be literally mapped to a city or even street location and can reveal other information about how you are connecting to the Internet. In the United States, the government is pushing to make this mapping increasingly precise.
Research sensitive topics
There’s a wealth of information available online. But perhaps in your country, access to information on AIDS, birth control, Tibetan culture, or world religions is behind a national firewall.
Skirt surveillance
Even harmless web browsing can sometimes raise red flags for suspicious observers. Using Tor protects your privacy by making it extremely difficult for an observer to correlate the sites you visit with your physical-world identity.
Circumvent censorship
If you live in a country that has ever blocked Facebook or Youtube, you might need to use Tor to get basic internet functionality.
Tor Browser 9.5a5 has been released.
Changelog
This release features important security updates to Firefox.
This release updates Firefox to 68.5.0esr, NoScript to 11.0.13, and on desktop, Tor to 0.4.3.2-alpha. We also added a new default bridge.
The full changelog since Tor Browser 9.5a4 is:
- All Platforms
- Update Firefox to 68.5.0esr
- Bump NoScript to 11.0.13
- Translations update
- Bug 30237: Control port module improvements for v3 client authentication
- Bug 32891: Add new default bridges
- Bug 31395: Remove inline script in aboutTor.xhtml
- Bug 27268: Preferences clean-up in Torbutton code
- Bug 32470: Backport fix for bug 1590538
- Bug 32414: Make Services.search.addEngine obey FPI
- Bug 32948: Make referer behavior consistent regardless of private browing mode status
- Bug 461204: Improve the random number generator for the boundaries in multipart/form-data
- Android
- Bug 30767: Custom obfs4 bridge does not work on Tor Browser for Android
- Windows + OS X + Linux
