41–50 of 78 posts
This is a important difference, because if there is active DPI that is shutting down a connection before handshake can happen, it will inflate the numbers massively.
I suspect what actually is happening is a ISP in UAE has deployed a DPI system that can detect the Tor TLS signature
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Holy shit! -4 to that? I don't mean to get all meta, but really I must be further out of touch than I realized.
I didn't downvote you, but I can imagine two different reasons that people might have done so: (1) They want to emphasize that there are lots of reasons to use Tor other than political dissidence and that Tor use should be normal or common for lots of people in lots of situations. (2) They feel like the role of tools like Tor in facilitating political dissidence is overstated and that you were implying that Tor will…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate the poetry but blocking Tor is a lot easier than preventing the wind and some governments (e.g. China) successfully do so.
Blocking Tor is one thing. But once people have made an effort to use Tor, you have lost as a regime.
I believe that tor metrics counts when a connection starts, not when a connection is _established_ This is a important difference, because if there is active DPI that is shutting down a connection before handshake can happen, it will inflate the numbers massively. I suspect what actually is happening is a ISP in UAE has deployed a DPI system that can detect the Tor TLS signature
If your theory is correct, then the title is slightly misleading.
I believe that tor metrics counts when a connection starts, not when a connection is _established_ This is a important difference, because if there is active DPI that is shutting down a connection before handshake can happen, it will inflate the numbers massively. I suspect what actually is happening is a ISP in UAE has deployed a DPI system that can detect the Tor TLS signature
This sounds convincing, a 25-fold spike in real users seems unlikely. If your theory is correct, then the title is slightly misleading.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy shit! -4 to that? I don't mean to get all meta, but really I must be further out of touch than I realized.
I didn't downvote you, but I can imagine two different reasons that people might have done so: (1) They want to emphasize that there are lots of reasons to use Tor other than political dissidence and that Tor use should be normal or common for lots of people in lots of situations. (2) They feel like the role of tools like Tor in facilitating political dissidence is overstated and that you were implying that Tor will…
That is my point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tor isn't safe from state-level attackers, as demonstrated by the Sybil attack launched by Carnegie Mellon the other year.
Do you have a link to the paper? "Sybil attack" is a rather large category of attacks and I'm curious about the specifics of this particular one. In particular, certain vulnerabilities can still be prohibitively expensive for use in dragnet-surveillance.
Just out of curiosity: How is Tor looking these days, security-wise? Does someone have a recent analysis of the attacks Tor is facing from state-level attackers currently? Just wondering if any new threats to Tor have come up in the recent years that hadn't been considered before stuff like Snowden happened.
So far though, the overwhelming majority of attacks on Tor users comes from things that aren't Tor itself --- e.g. Firefox vulnerabilities, timing side-channels on when the user was home, etc. Additionally, if you're not doing anything illegal, you're less likely to be targeted on Tor. Not that this is to say "if you're not doing something illegal you have nothing to hide!", just that your adversaries are likely not powerful or motivated enough to target you on Tor if what you're doing isn't illegal. Even in places like China, where every attempt to block Tor is made, they typically don't spend much effort in targeting those who do try to use Tor. This means if your motivation for Tor is to do things like stop web site trackers, it's not only a good option, it's probably the best available.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds convincing, a 25-fold spike in real users seems unlikely. If your theory is correct, then the title is slightly misleading.
And even if they were only counting successful connections, connections != users.