xB Browser

» see xerobank.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 19 September 2006 the Cult of the Dead Cow put out a press release for a browser called Torpark. Steve Topletz had spent more than a year on it, and what he had built was Portable Firefox with a Tor client wired into it, packaged so the whole thing ran off a USB stick without installing anything or leaving anything behind on the host machine.

The pitch was simple enough to explain in one sentence, which is rare in this field. Plug the stick into a computer that is not yours and open the browser, and your traffic leaves through Tor instead of through whatever is logging the local network. The license came from Hacktivismo, the cDc group that wrote software with ethical terms attached to it, so using the browser to do certain things was a license violation as well as everything else it was.

It found an audience fast. By February 2008 it had passed six and a half million downloads, which made it the most widely distributed anonymity browser on the internet at that point, several years before the Tor Project had a mass-market package of its own.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the stick ~

Portability was the entire product. In 2006 a Tor install meant a separate client plus a browser you reconfigured by hand, and you had to have permission to install both. Torpark collapsed that into a directory you could copy anywhere. That mattered most on machines where you had no administrator rights and no privacy: a library terminal, a university lab, a shared office desktop, an internet cafe.

Turkey is full of that last category, and I spent 2002 to 2005 in them, back when a cafe machine was where you played Counter-Strike and checked MSN. By 2006 I had TTNet broadband at home and had stopped going, so Torpark showed up about a year after the machines it was designed for had stopped being my machines. It found its users somewhere else.

~ the name ~

In 2007 Torpark became xB Browser, and the project was redesigned from scratch rather than carried over from the Portable Firefox fork. The rename moved it under XeroBank, a commercial anonymity service run by Xero Networks AG, and the browser became the client for that company's paid network as well as a way onto Tor.

That is the turn the project never recovered from. A tool released by a hacker collective with an ethics clause in its license is one kind of object. The free client of a subscription VPN is another, and the second one has a business behind it that wants you on its own network.

~ the last build ~

Version 3.9.10.24 went out on 24 October 2009. There was no announcement and no farewell page, just a version number that turned out to be the end of the line.

The thing that took the oxygen was the Tor Project itself. Once Tor shipped a supported bundle with its own patched Firefox, maintained by the people who maintained the network, a third-party portable browser from a VPN vendor had a hard case to make. Torpark had been the answer to a question the Tor Project had not yet answered, and it stopped being needed the moment they did.

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