telnet is a dependency of GitHub - Kicksecure/tor-ctrl: Raw use of tor's controller. The protocol is no longer recommended for remote connections but fine for use in local network. The package installed by itself does not cause any security risk. telnet does not run itself.
Not convinced, I haven’t seen any rar file for ages and no users asking about it ever.
sensible-browser starts the tor browser. The kde stuff is pulled in mostly through kdesudo it seems, we already have a thread for this. Etc/UTC and UTC are the same. Thunderbird should indeed be installed on the workstation, I’d also add some kind of archive manager like xarchiver + some utils like xz, zip … on KDE there was ark for that purpose.
thunar.xml:
Fault of kdelibs. Ideally we’ll get rid of but we may or may not. Root cause is kdesudo vs gksudo. Not a security issue, just a usability issue. Discussion here:
If you disagree please demonstrate an actual malfunction, i.e. timezone leak, timezone mismatch, default timezone gmt shown somewhere or anything similar.
Some detail enhancements / usability fixes are doable which we can incorporate in upgrades / subsequent releases. Please create https://phabricator.whonix.org tickets for anything still missing.
Overall Whonix for VirtualBox with XFCE 14.0.0.9.6 - Release Candidate 1 seems to works well enough. Better than Whonix KDE version. Unless some major bug is found, this version can probably soon be released as stable Whonix default download.
Not good argument pick on security, just because its not running doesnt mean its not risky. openssh-server doesnt run by itself but its a risk being there. actually any program or package doesnt run by itself (as assuming thats the default for almost all packages), but that doesnt mean its fine to install them by default for all users. also the real issue that telnet exist in WS & GW which give it more risky privileges on Whonix Design.
Because most of our community atm are techy linux users, and we left Windows long time ago. Thats why we dont hear about it much, although when users drag/drop or download .rar then they need to search for how to open it up. and i dont see much problems/risk of having it specially in the WorkStation.
rar is still a widely used file format and in my opinion should be supported out of the box to be more beginner-friendly.
In addition to that, I’d like to see thunar-archive-plugin installed, so thunar can handle archives. I personally would use file-roller but if you want to keep it smaller xarchiver will also work (although it’s drag&drop is kinda useless).
Thank you for switching to xfce.