Monday, October 23, 2006

A few useful applescripts

I sat next to Paul Syverson at the WESII workshop in Washington DC today.

During a discussion of Firefox/Safari, he remarked that it'd be really neat if something like Tor Button existed for the Safari Web browser (which instead of using its own proxy settings relies upon the OS's settings).

A an hour later, and after a bit if hackery, I present the following:

A script that toggles the proxy settings in Mac OSX (Tiger) on/off for Tor:
As a script and As an application that you can double-click on.

There's also a very useful script available elsewhere which will start Safari in private browsing mode by default.

One item of frustration is that to get any of the scripts to work, you must set the "Enable access for assistive devices" feature in the "Universal Access" system preference. Without this, nothing will work.

This appears to be a reasonably valid security preference in the OS. Without this option, scripts cannot control various elements of the user-interface.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tried it. It worked fine, almost. I got that
Safari couldn't find the web page when the
proxy toggled Tor on. I thought at first it was
because I had been using "127.0.0.1" and the
script used "localhost", but then I saw that it
used "localhost " (spurious space). I edited it,
and it worked---my first script-bug edit.
Look Mommy I are a hacker,
I can hack all the way to 4!

دیکلورانت said...

hello there.
does it work on mac os 10.6 ?
i`m Irainian and the government filtered every wher, even News websites.
the are millions of anti filters for windows but nothing for Mac.
i clicked on the script and ran it,but nothings happened.