I'm trying these two critters out with some good success.

For those not familiar, Orbot and Orweb are an implementation of the TOR client for Android. TOR is The Onion Router, a traceback hampering system designed to secure against eavesdropping and wiretapping of internet traffic for those that need such a thing. That includes, among others, dissidents and journalists operating within a hostile territory.

No, I have no urgent need to use it, though I can envision potentially needing to depending on which way the Federal Government blows with its anti-Free-Speech bills pleasantly formed to combat piracy and child pornography. (While those are legitimate aims, especially the latter, the legislation recently proposed in the U.S. borders on attrociously draconian.) My interest is twofold. Technical first, I'm interested in how well it works from my phone and how easy it is to get along with it. Altruistic secondly, TOR achieves greater invulnerability to wiretapping the more people who don't need it also use it as well as those who do need it use it for everything rather than selectively. (Think of it this way: it becomes even less likely someone with gobs of money can pay an army of a thousand to re assemble your shredded credit card statement if you've also mixed in a lot of non-sensitive papers as well.)

For reference and disambiguation I'm using a permarooted Droid 2 Global.

Install was a breeze. Configuration went quickly. I enabled proxy for everything in Orbot. (I could have been selective, but I wanted it all run through there.)

Lag is a mild problem for me. It exists, enough that I wouldn't try to stream anything live up to Ustream or YouTubeLive or any such. That, for those who use such tools as part of dissent, would be a problem. For messaging, email, web browsing, and composing this post, Twitter, G+, Facebook, ... really aside from streaming I go looking for problems and don't find them.

Two inconveniences to cope with that go away over time, one just with persistence and one with research and learning.

In the Android OS model there is this beautiful thing called "Intent" which allows applications to register URL patterns that they can service. URLs can be http, https, or something novel. (Not entirely new, Windows allows this via how it integrates MIME redirecting into even command execution. The Steam client, for instance, makes use of this and shortcuts to steam://... can be seen if you inspect some. Just especially well done in Android.) The default handler for most intents is the browser, for many good reasons, including enabling "omnibar" cabaility. Orweb needs to be the default instead, yet there's some fragmentation that occurs as you check it as the default. There are seemingly multiple patterns that need re-defaulting to Orweb, not just one. This goes away.

The other is coping with websites that detect IP address and infer language and regional information, then either redirect or reconfigure according to what they see. With TOR working normally, this kind of function isn't just meaningless -- you literally could seem to be coming from anywhere there's a TOR exit-point -- it gets in the way. I had to learn "google.com/ncr" is what I need, not "google.com" in order to ensure I get the U.S. version of google that I can grok.

I may go back after a few, I may go back and forth -- in fact if I leave I may well come back on occasion just to throw my noise in the traffic. Tabbed browsing is not present in Orweb and I expect I won't be able to view YouTube well. Some of these things are better accomplished from a desktop. It is, though, nice to know a very highly functional TOR client that seems quite stable is available in a mobile format.

--random