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Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

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Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#31

Post by andreyf »

ikeboy wrote: post #26
hackuser wrote: post #20

I don't agree with this statement from the article: This, and Tor’s history of US government sponsorship, has led to series of really embarrassing conspiracy theories from the likes of PandoDaily. This is why non-technical journalists should not write about technical subjects. If you’re going to suggest that open-source software has dark ulterior vulnerabilities, you need to point at exactly where they are in the cod…

Friendly reminder that SELinux was developed by the NSA, and is now part of Linux. So clearly the open source community doesn't care too much about who created a piece of code. Case study 2: bitcoin.

Also, Tor is not designed to be resistant against traffic analysis by a global passive adversary. That isn't the kind of evidence that can be used in a US court, but intelligence agencies aren't primarily interested in bringing cases in front of courts, anyway.

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#32

Post by khed »

hackuser wrote: post #16
hellofunk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these points are partly why I chose to go with a commercial VPN regularly rather than Tor. There is also no change at all in my bandwidth with the VPN, and I can seamlessly use high bandwidth tools like Netflix, streaming audio/video, etc. Maybe Tor has improved lately to allow this kind of behavior easily also?

Watching HTML5 video on Tor is fine, though I haven't tried a 2 hour movie in high resolution. The main challenge is that if you want to preserve many security benefits of Tor then you can't use Flash. Tor's performance generally works well enough that I think most users could use it most of the time and make non-Tor usage a special case.

This is my normal mode of operation :) I use it on my phone, desktop, and laptop for pretty much everything.

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#33

Post by leohutson »

moxie wrote: post #28
rodgerd wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's not possible to review it all much less to catch subtle exploits that might have been introduced by security agencies - we can't even catch many unintentional exploits Precisely. In the wake of Shellshock and Heartbleed the sneering tone of the passage you've cited should profoundly embarrass the author. It does not accord well with the facts.

People tend to cite heartbleed as an example of how "open source" has no intrinsic security value. While I agree that something being "open source" does not automatically make it secure, I think that it does allow us to gauge the security of the project. In the case of heartbleed, anyone who has ever spent more than 30 seconds looking at OpenSSL can tell you that it is not secure software and never will be. We can't…

People that claim open source has no security value seem to believe that just because you can't catch every vulnerability through public review, you may as well not bother at all. That logic is obviously faulty, I can't imagine they would apply the same rationale to cancer screening.

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#34

Post by olefoo »

andreyf wrote: post #31
ikeboy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Friendly reminder that SELinux was developed by the NSA, and is now part of Linux. So clearly the open source community doesn't care too much about who created a piece of code. Case study 2: bitcoin.

Also, Tor is not designed to be resistant against traffic analysis by a global passive adversary. That isn't the kind of evidence that can be used in a US court, but intelligence agencies aren't primarily interested in bringing cases in front of courts, anyway.

Although there has been more than a little evidence of "Parallel Construction" happening where the aforementioned global passive adversary pushes a treasure map to the local law enforcement agencies with indicators as to where to look...

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#35

Post by lcswi »

kamekai wrote: post #19
hellofunk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of these points are partly why I chose to go with a commercial VPN regularly rather than Tor. There is also no change at all in my bandwidth with the VPN, and I can seamlessly use high bandwidth tools like Netflix, streaming audio/video, etc. Maybe Tor has improved lately to allow this kind of behavior easily also?

Nope. Still an annoying process to stream YouTube, and it still chops. The general vibe of the Tor community is to not use up excess bandwidth unless you have to, because it chokes endpoints and gateways and leaves less room for others. I think a lot of gateways probably run some form of bandwidth limiter, but that's just speculation. It's considered extremely bad taste to do things such as high-volume P2P

I stream musicvideo on youtube via tor all day and if things are too slow I simply use the 'new circuit' button. It works very well.

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#36

Post by hackuser »

khed wrote: post #32
hackuser wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Watching HTML5 video on Tor is fine, though I haven't tried a 2 hour movie in high resolution. The main challenge is that if you want to preserve many security benefits of Tor then you can't use Flash. Tor's performance generally works well enough that I think most users could use it most of the time and make non-Tor usage a special case.

This is my normal mode of operation :) I use it on my phone, desktop, and laptop for pretty much everything.

How is it implemented on your phone? Does it cover all your phone's network usage?

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#37

Post by polymatter »

ikeboy wrote: post #27
tete wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually switched to using Tor whenever I go on wild hunts about stuff that I find interesting. Basically that means whenever I visit Wikipedia, because I can waste hours there, going over the weirdest topics. Usually I get drawn in by stuff like history and end up on things like Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Japan in WW2, etc. or stuff like Ku Klux Klan, the "Islamic State". If there is some surveillance system it w…

You can download a copy of Wikipedia articles from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ . It's surprisingly small, around 15GB for all articles, and 50GB or so uncompressed. Then just browse offline, and nobody can tell what articles you looked at.

Is there any way to get just the static html pages post 2008 when they just stopped doing them? That's 6 years out of date.

The Wikipedia on DVD link doesn't seem to work http://www.wikipediaondvd.com/.

And I am not sure what to do with the Database backup dumps if the only thing I want is some static HTML pages, how could I get some readable HTML out of them?

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#38

Post by ikeboy »

polymatter wrote: post #37
ikeboy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can download a copy of Wikipedia articles from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ . It's surprisingly small, around 15GB for all articles, and 50GB or so uncompressed. Then just browse offline, and nobody can tell what articles you looked at.

Is there any way to get just the static html pages post 2008 when they just stopped doing them? That's 6 years out of date. The Wikipedia on DVD link doesn't seem to work http://www.wikipediaondvd.com/ . And I am not sure what to do with the Database backup dumps if the only thing I want is some static HTML pages, how could I get some readable HTML out of them?

You can't get the html anymore. You can download the dump (latest one is enwiki-20151102-pages-articles.xml.bz2, around 11GB), and then generate the pages dynamically.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download#St..., and the next section. There are a bunch of programs that can do various things, and if you're on a reasonably recent computer, you shouldn't have a problem dynamically loading anything. There's even a rockbox plugin, which I used for some time, on a slow mp3 player.

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#39

Post by imrehg »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #24
mark_l_watson wrote: post #2

An important point the article makes is how important it is for a large number of people to use Tor, even if only occasionally. I try to use Tor at least once or twice a week for general web browsing. I also donated money to them. It is really important for people to also support groups like the EFF and ACLU financially: a good investment in future freedom. History shows that large empires tend to get tough on their…

I configure things that I don't need to be fast to run over Tor. IRC and email are examples.

Regarding IRC, I just wish Freenode hadn't blocked Tor and discontinued previous Tor access methods[0], so can't really be used at all.

[0]: https://freenode.net/irc_servers.shtml#tor

Re: Tor Wars: The Signal Awakens

#40

Post by grubles »

ikeboy wrote: post #26
hackuser wrote: post #20

I don't agree with this statement from the article: This, and Tor’s history of US government sponsorship, has led to series of really embarrassing conspiracy theories from the likes of PandoDaily. This is why non-technical journalists should not write about technical subjects. If you’re going to suggest that open-source software has dark ulterior vulnerabilities, you need to point at exactly where they are in the cod…

Friendly reminder that SELinux was developed by the NSA, and is now part of Linux. So clearly the open source community doesn't care too much about who created a piece of code. Case study 2: bitcoin.

Case study 1: the US Department of Defense created ARPANET, the first network to implement TCP/IP.
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