I have heard that China runs lots of nodes in order to a) spy on people who want to hide from the chinese government and b) spy on foreigners and c) make life harder for western intelligence agencies.
Maybe every secret police or spy organization runs exit nodes and you just have to use those from a government that has no interest in you.
Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
71–80 of 170 posts
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#72Haha, oh, Zed. Pretty sure the military STILL uses Tor. Oh no! What could the Navy or army have use for a tool that protects them from surveillance?! Oh right, everything... It was all fun and games when Zed was talking shit about Ruby but he's jumped the shark. It was bad enough when he freaked out because someone was converting his books code to Ruby from Python. Free code but not free book?
The report is that "A branch of the U.S. Navy uses Tor for open source intelligence gathering". All this means is that they use it to obscure their origin IP address from a website when they are collecting publicly available information (so that people don't look at their logs and see a huge navy.mil spider or the like) and has nothing to do with anti-surveillance or a sophisticated attacker being able to track them.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I did try to use Tor to get past censorship(I'm in China) and it's not effective here unless you already know someone outside the Chinese network to connect to (that is not a public ip). They (Tor) are losing their fight. IMO
Suppose the FreedomBox catches on, and there's a Tor node on half of them. That could represents millions of Tor exit nodes within 5 years. That should turn the tide, don't you think?
If we're playing the suppose game, what if the chinese government collapses? That'd turn the tide too, and there's probably a better chance of that happening then there ever being millions of tor exits.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#74(I rather suspect that Mr Shaw is trolling, but anyway.) It's certainly true that humans have all manner of interesting behaviors owing to the fact that we're smart apes with huge numbers of survival heuristics. I would pause before taking a sandwich from Hitler, because I'm human, but it's not pertinent to the question of whether the sandwich is any good. (Except in as far as you think it more or less likely that th…
>So I find the whole first half of the text to be a flabby way of saying that the arguments of dishonest people need to be evaluated more critically than those of honest people. But I find that the arguments of honest people need to be critically evaluated too.
You over-simplified the argument here, I think. I read it more as a person's motivations need to be considered, not particularly honesty. And nearly everybody has motivations that may influence how and what information they present to you.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If enough people were using it, I'd think that a) some of them would be government operatives and b) the traffic could be analyzed to identify and remove internet access from a large number of the participants. I don't know that much about darknets so maybe the traffic analysis is not so straightforward.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#76Ad Hominems are a-ok now are they? Well here's Zed's thought process: a) Read Greenwald Salon article accusing Wired of having shady connections. b) Roll that basic premise into a set of wild accusations and things we already know about Tor. c) Sit back and enjoy the whole chaos of the troll. When someone attacks bring out the usual sockpuppets and sycophants to say "but Zed does all this great coding", "Zed is not l…
Ad hominem is a fallacy when the motives or nature of the arguer are brought up inappropriately. If it is relevant, it is not ad hominem, usually because it expands into something else if you really think about it. As long as we've suspended Godwin's Law for the day...
"The sky is blue." "He's a Nazi!" is ad hominem.
"Has anyone noticed the Jews have an awful lot of banking jobs?" "He's a Nazi!" is, if true, very relevant. The first statement is likely not just a mere observation that may be true or may be false but is historically associated with antisemitism and is probably being used as the thin end of the wedge and not a neutral observation. It's relevant here because it expands into an argument where the origins and motivations of the arguer are in fact very relevant.
Similarly, when you see a new physics theory coming from a known crackpot, while the fact they are a crackpot may technically have no effect on the truth value of the theory, when it comes time for you to evaluate the theory you are justified in noticing it's coming from a crackpot.
Bayesian logic lets you express it even more cleanly; in Aristotelian logic the motivations of the speaker are irrelevant to the abstract truth of the statement; in more practical Bayesian logic, as you personally examine the likely truth value of somebody else's statement (with no presumption of access to the abstract truth) their motivations can be very relevant. "ad hominem" is over-weighting their motivations or falsely weighting their motivations, and under this formulation you also get reverse ad hominem, in which you under-weight their motivations, which is every much a fallacy as the original ad hominem, and which Zed talks about in his post.
All things considered, people being hyper about ad hominem is probably better than letting it slide too often, because it is certainly true that on average it is not a valid attack. But he's absolutely correct that it is sometimes valid, and while I'm not sure Zed's necessarily correct about Tor, I do think he's a lot more justified in his opinions than the pileon here consensus is indicating.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there was an organized effort to bust people using Tor then a pattern would emerge. In so much if they were high-profile targets (political dissidents, whistleblowers, spies, etc.). If they were cp collectors I don't think anyone would care enough to do an investigation.
This assumes that political dissidents, whistleblowers and spies are using tor in any significant numbers. It seems quite unlikely to me that this is true. I think you'd find that the vast majority of tor traffic is comprised of people trying to mask their location for criminal reasons, people looking to bypass local firewall restrictions and people using it as a free VPN.
Yes, but even criminals talk. If there were a string of busts and the item connecting them all was the fact that Tor was used by the criminals then it would be an easy conclusion to say that Tor has been compromised.
Most of the CP cases are done with a lot social engineering. Instead of having some sort of super router that can sniff through all the packets its just a bunch of LEOs in an office trying to gain the confidence of the criminals.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#78“@zedshaw If you don't trust Tor because of me, you clearly do not understand how Tor works. You can BadExit my nodes buddy.” Appelbaum, https://twitter.com/#!/ioerror/status/19703396818747392
I was curious about this, so I started googling for how to do this. Sure enough, it's a bitch and the only way to really do it easily is to use a GUI like Tork. Not to mention I can't seem to figure out how you find his nodes in order to BadExit them, and I very seriously doubt his nodes will get listed in anything official. Anyone got good instructions on how to actually BadExit his nodes? I want to post them so peo…
If you add this to your torrc:
ExcludeNodes $0AD3FA884D18F89EEA2D89C019379E0E7FD94417,$3100A70862157E5F9136B6AAEB7571745D4DC055,$49E2C345FDA5E9ADFE13320690BF2C77EA803E6C,$4A0CCD2DDC7995083D73F5D667100C8A5831F16D,$5FABB67A4C229ECACD53F5E02B62C87E5300728D,$62665FD8A07D2E0F6ABDB4A36283A5A8824C0128,$6AF64BD1DF8B92D5194760C2256EBF80F70273DD,$71B7F2406DDAE829979B53963B952E17CD021125,$8522EB98C91496E80EC238E732594D1509158E77,$D67C5F501DAA0EE65AF9422A36385217D8AD3927,$EFE02E652CA2EB6FD96B30DC77EA55ABF7EFC1A5
To verify this:
Check https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual-dev.html.en for the ExcludeNodes directive. There is an ExcludeExitNodes option, if you're willing to tolerate him as a middle-man, and just not exit out his nodes.
Check one of the online directory servers (e.g. http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/) and use the Advanced Query Options to find all the nodes where "Contact" - "Contains" - "appelbaum.net" to find which nodes he administers. Then add the fingerprint of every node you want to avoid to the ExcludeNodes entry.
You should obviously confirm the list above with other sources, because one or all of the following might be true:
1. I may be in cahoots with Jacob, plotting to hack your codez.
2. The directory server I linked to may be a co-conspirator. Fortunately, there are other directory servers you can query.
3. There is no three. Anybody can put up a node and declare anything. If Jacob, or I, are using Tor nodes nefariously, do you really think we'll put our names on them?
P.S. Don't forget to restart Tor after you change the torrc.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#79Remember that Zed Shaw was "a top qualified soldier in the US Army". Maybe Zed is a bad actor in the pay of the US Army and this article is an attempt to discredit Tor for their benefit! ;)
Your emoticon indicates you were joking, but in all seriousness, in the context of discussion about this article, Zed himself makes it a real issue.
Re: Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor
#80track the follow up twitter bickering between Zed and Appelbaum: http://bettween.com/ioerror/zedshaw/Dec-21-2010/Dec-28-2010/...