Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor • Hacker News Board

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#41

Post by smcl » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:16 PM UTC

narag wrote: post #18

redthrowaway wrote: post #11

It's an interesting question. If Project Vigilant had compromised Tor, I'd expect there to be quite a few pedophiles who had used it to share cp getting busted. I'm not aware of any such incidents, let alone many. I imagine that the government wouldn't want to give away that they had it compromised, and so would simply use the information to compose a list of people to watch for slip ups, but one would expect to see…

I find funny that I was re-reading a novel this morning during the commute, about a WWII cryptographer and arrived at the point were he sees that the warning in every secret document was "never take any action that could reveal the enemy that we can break their encryption".

Cryptonomicon, perhaps? I loved that book

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#42

Post by kungfooguru » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:19 PM UTC

"I haven't once seen you answer the claims I made."

Woo, Zed is the new Glenn Beck.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#43

Post by JonnieCache » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:26 PM UTC

Tor is not exactly an ideal solution to the problem of privacy, as zed has pointed out. It is however a great solution to the closely related problems of anonymity and legal deniability.

If you're running an international criminal network I imagine it's ideal.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#44

Post by poet » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:28 PM UTC

It's shit like this Zed...

Two basic claims: Tor is tainted because (1) the concepts the software is based on were developed with partial funding from the military and (2) Zed thinks one of the committers is untrustworthy. Guess what? That describes a huge amount of software, including Mac OS X and Firefox. God damn Zed, this Hitler sandwich shit is pretty weak.

Zed also has a problem with Tor because he thinks there is a "gigantic percentage of hackers and security experts on the volunteer payroll of a group who's job is to illegally wiretap people and circumvent the law on behalf of the government". He thinks some of these people work on Tor and thus Tor is untrustworthy. Funny though, his ISP is likely guilty of the same thing. I wonder if Zed takes that into account as a part of his paranoid fantasy.

There are serious problems with using Tor and Zed fails to mention any of them. You'll want to read what Thomas has to say on the subject (http://searchyc.com/tptacek). Specifically, Thomas mentions that a general problem with tools like Tor is that it identifies your traffic as a subset of all traffic thats probably worth monitoring. You're essentially adding bright red neon signs to your most sensitive traffic. The amount of traffic going through the Tor network is small enough that it is a tractable problem for a nation state to attempt to monitor all of it. Thomas also goes into how the incentive structure for these tools is completely broken. The defenders are academic researchers going for tenure, the attackers are nation states with millions of dollars to spend, and the users are dissidents that get killed when the tool fails. Unfortunately, arguments with this level of nuance appear to escape Zed in this case. I fear he doesn't have the domain knowledge to write something intelligent about this issue.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#45

Post by gst » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:28 PM UTC

dublinclontarf wrote: post #32

As someone living on the other side of the Great Firewall of China it's become VERY clear that a government can effectively censor the internet(without VPN to get out it's terrible), provided that the government in question put enough effort into it. As I said in another comment, the Chinese government has beaten Tor. You can't download it or even read about it(almost everything Tor related is blocked). Even when you…

What would prevent the Chinese government from just blocking I2P?

Also, while Tor isn't used in China there seem to be some other Proxy Services that are used. A non-tech-savvy friend of mine who is Chinese citizen and moved back to China one year ago, uses some kind of proxy service to connect to sites like Facebook. I have the impression that the knowledge how to circumvent the firewall is rather common in China.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#46

Post by JonnieCache » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:42 PM UTC

dublinclontarf wrote: post #32

As someone living on the other side of the Great Firewall of China it's become VERY clear that a government can effectively censor the internet(without VPN to get out it's terrible), provided that the government in question put enough effort into it. As I said in another comment, the Chinese government has beaten Tor. You can't download it or even read about it(almost everything Tor related is blocked). Even when you…

At the end of the day when you're dealing with a government that has absolutely no qualms about simply taking you away and killing you discreetly, regardless of who you are, there is no hack clever enough to protect you.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#47

Post by dublinclontarf » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:46 PM UTC

gst wrote: post #45

dublinclontarf wrote: post #32

As someone living on the other side of the Great Firewall of China it's become VERY clear that a government can effectively censor the internet(without VPN to get out it's terrible), provided that the government in question put enough effort into it. As I said in another comment, the Chinese government has beaten Tor. You can't download it or even read about it(almost everything Tor related is blocked). Even when you…

What would prevent the Chinese government from just blocking I2P? Also, while Tor isn't used in China there seem to be some other Proxy Services that are used. A non-tech-savvy friend of mine who is Chinese citizen and moved back to China one year ago, uses some kind of proxy service to connect to sites like Facebook. I have the impression that the knowledge how to circumvent the firewall is rather common in China.

There are many paid VPN services available to those who have credit cards. These VPN services are based outside China. But this is quite expensive for most Chinese people to use.

The reason Tor isn't used in China is that most of the bridge relay IP addresses are blacklisted by Chinese ISP's and net-cops. Now the list of bridge relays are not public, but China has enough man power(working full time I might add) to get ahold of nearly all the ip's and block them.

Actually it wouldn't be too difficult to automate this at all.

Knowlege to circumvent the wall is available, it's the resources to do so that are lacking.

I2P currently is too small to show up on the Chinese governments radar. Apart from this I don't know how I2P gets the ip's of the darknet node. The only guaranteed way to be safe is to have a Freind to Friend network, with absolutely no public connection nodes.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#48

Post by dublinclontarf » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:47 PM UTC

JonnieCache wrote: post #46

dublinclontarf wrote: post #32

As someone living on the other side of the Great Firewall of China it's become VERY clear that a government can effectively censor the internet(without VPN to get out it's terrible), provided that the government in question put enough effort into it. As I said in another comment, the Chinese government has beaten Tor. You can't download it or even read about it(almost everything Tor related is blocked). Even when you…

At the end of the day when you're dealing with a government that has absolutely no qualms about simply taking you away and killing you discreetly, regardless of who you are, there is no hack clever enough to protect you.

True, but a good Friend to Friend darknet cannot be stopped as long as there is a network to run it on.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#49

Post by Tichy » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 1:57 PM UTC

I didn't understand the part where Wikileaks and Tor are supposed to have different goals. I thought the point of Wikileaks was to publish information anonymously - surely Tor would be suitable to help with that (Tor as it is supposed to work)?

I must admit that I am simply too chicken to use Tor. In Germany I think it can actually get you in trouble if some pedophile exits through your node.

Also last I checked, there really were some issues with the security model. That was quite a long time ago, not sure if they have been fixed now.

Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

#50

Post by loup-vaillant » Tue, Dec 28, 2010, 2:04 PM UTC

shareme wrote: post #25

yardie wrote: post #23

OMG! The government created something useful therefore it can only, fundamentally, be a trojan horse. While I'm sure there could be some crackers out there trying to insert bad code. I also believe these things tend not to stick around for long. Especially when blame says "Hey, I've inserted code here, here and here. Try not to read me too closely." I've tried Tor in the past and I stopped because: * It's really slow…

If wikileaks can snoop tor nodes to get its first data release than that is in fact a trojan horse..no imagination required..

As I understood it, some of the guys who leaked material for Wikileaks did so by using Tor normally, like would a Chinese journalist. Wikileaks doesn't need to crack or misuse Tor in any way to receive leaks through it.