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1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

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Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#161

Post by akavel »

evgen wrote: post #159
akavel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said, I've already reported as a bug via FB, weeks ago, haven't heard from anybody since then. Is there some other way I should use? As to the root cause, that's what I suspected, and it also tells me that the TOR gateway seems not well covered by tests and thus prone to breaking. And you won't know, as TOR users have no way to report in-band.

So I didn't tell you this or suggest it in public, but it helps to sometimes use that _other_ social network to tell FB folks that something is not working. A lot of user reports of Tor FB issues get to the appropriate team in the London office via Twitter...

Ehmh. Now... I'm semi-embarassed to admit that I don't use Twitter. (Although really, not really even semi.) And at this point, I don't think I care enough. Also, as much as I'm grateful to you for following up and trying your best at helping me find a contact channel, please note I've already tried two channels. The in-FB one, which I'd expect could be treated with some seriousness, then HN. Is it still not enough? am I to believe if I tried Twitter someone would suddenly magically care? I'm hard pressed. And I don't care enough to beg and dance for however long it would have to take; especially given that this already signals to me that the FB team simply doesn't care either. So even if I succeeded in persisting and breaking through, the chance is big it'd soon break in some other way. And unfortunately I don't plan on becoming unpaid full-time FB QA.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#162

Post by ggregoire »

jaeh wrote: post #96
slig wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why doesn't China block Tor? Isn't it easy as blocking all known public IP addresses? It doesn't make sense to not allow the user to access certain sites, but allow Tor that can easily bypass that protection.

there are non public ip addresses and the tor team spends quite some time fighting the big firewall in various ways. talk from the 23c3 about tor and china: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6A7jLpL3Rs

great talk, thanks for sharing this video

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#163

Post by nikcub »

dev1n wrote: post #153
nikcub wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me only 24 hours and about $200-300 in compute to hit Blockchains hidden server key which is: blockchainbdgpzk.onion I'm pretty sure it's the second most trafficked site after FB If anyone is looking at setting up a hidden service and wants a memorable name I still have the cluster setup. Matching 10 characters isn't much of a challenge - it's why hidden service addressed on their own don't provide identity a…

if you don't mind me asking, how many cores / what cloud service did you use to compute that?

Sorry I missed your reply - I was using AWS G1 insances (on the spot market) plus my own password cracking cluster (the old one had 6 ATi cards, building a new one now)

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#164

Post by mike-cardwell »

I use "Tinfoil for Facebook" on my Android phone. It's a wrapper around the mobile site with some extra features, and you can tell it to use "Orbot" (Tor client for Android), and you can tell it to use the onion address as well if you want (which I do). Which means I can use Facebook over Tor without using the official app which steals god knows what data from your phone.

You don't get mobile notifications this way, so I just get my notifications via email instead. And I uploaded my public PGP key to Facebook, so the emails they send me are encrypted. Getting notifications via email also means that Facebook doesn't even know if or when I've read a particular notification.

To read those encrypted emails on my phone I use K-9 Mail with OpenKeyChain. My Yubikey Neo acts like a smart card reader to my phone over NFC so I don't need to give my phone direct access to my secret PGP key.

This setup works for me because I try to limit my Facebook usage, keep my number of "friends" on there to a minimum, and lie to Facebook whenever they want me to explicitly supply information.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#165

Post by boomlinde »

Titanous wrote: post #6
HalcyonicStorm wrote: post #2

Please explain it to me if I'm wrong, but doesn't logging into Facebook on Tor defeat the purpose of Tor?

No, you retain all of the properties of Tor hidden services: censorship resistance, authenticated end-to-end encryption, onion routing that hides your source IP. Obviously if you log into a Facebook account with your real-world identity then all actions performed on the site will be linked with it, but that is expected.

I think his point is that if you are using Facebook, you are still limited by the level of trust you have with them. That should be quite low for any privacy conscious internet user. That you are using a different IP and a pseudonym might be a hoop for them to jump through through to figure your identity out should be considered in the context that they are likely already collecting data about you without your consent from many different sources. When it comes to jumping through these kinds of hoops, Facebook is a circus lion.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#166

Post by hfourm »

etiam wrote: post #129
hfourm wrote: post #94

Terrible title. I was wondering in what use case Facebook makes sense as an alternative to Tor

Seems clear enough to me. But the misreading is hilarious. Thanks for sharing.

I just think when we are talking about two technologies like this, something like "via" or "through" is a bit clearer.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#167

Post by PhasmaFelis »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #130
putasidemobile wrote: post #123

Related: Please Facebook, let me peek over your walled garden. Taking a privacy-friendly stance, with the current Facebook, hurts my social life. I do not trust your company, and I think you are bound to act unethically in the future. But I do not ask you to become a trustworthy ethical company. Mess with the accounts of my friends all you want. I just want to be invited to the next BBQ. People have stopped using e-m…

Facebook users can invite non-Facebook users by email to events, if they want to. But for viewing what your friends and parents are doing on Facebook? Well, they could change their privacy settings to be public, but that would hurt their privacy. You want to be in their social graph, but not have a Facebook account. What does that even mean? Do you just not want to have a password? There's no rule you have to post an…

> Facebook users can invite non-Facebook users by email to events, if they want to.

They can, but they generally don't.

Re: 1M People Use Facebook Over Tor

#168

Post by MacsHeadroom »

ryan-c wrote: post #100
MacsHeadroom wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realize that was sarcasm. But for the non-hash-aware among us, it would take on average 2,147,483,647 as long to brute force the last 8 with the same computing power and 4,294,967,295 as long to hash every combination of the last 8. This all assumes no vulnerabilities in the algorithm, of course.

It's base32, not base16, so you're off by several orders of magnitude - numbers should be 549,755,813,888 and 1,099,511,627,776.

I believe you are correct. I appreciate the correction.
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