Stoutner

Problems with Orbot

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by

Soren Stoutner
in

There is a bug with recent versions of Orbot (16.0.2-RC-1, 16.0.5-RC-2-tor-0.3.4.9) that causes HTTP proxying to fail (HTTPS proxying works just fine). That means that webpages that begin with https:// will load just fine but webpages that begin with http:// will not.

I have filed a bug report with the developers of Orbot. Those who would like to see this issue fixed should add a comment to this bug report.

There are two workaround you can use until they release an update that fixes the problem.

  1. Downgrade to version 16.0.0-RC-2 of Orbot, which works fine.
  2. Enable Orbot’s VPN mode and disable Privacy Browser’s Orbot proxy setting.  Privacy Browser’s URL bar background will not be blue, but all traffic will be routed through Tor because of the OS level VPN. The potential downside to this workaround is that all the device’s traffic is being forced through Tor, which may not be desired.

Update: with the release of Privacy Browser 3.3, Tor proxying has been switched to using SOCKS, which resolves this problem.

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