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Zed Shaw: Why I Don't Use Tor

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

#81
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends what it collapses into?

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

#82
post #44

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 ther…

> 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.

You don't need TOR. You do need an ISP.

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

#83
"Wikileak's job is to take people's secrets and show them and who's hiding them to the world."

Here we see the again the conflation of organizations and individuals in an opinion piece connected to Wikileaks. Why does this happen so regularly?

I don't know anything about Appelbaum, but it's perfectly possible that he believes in personal privacy and institutional transparency, a not particularly radical, surprising, or unusual stance which would resolve this "conflict of interest" perfectly.

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

#84

Full twitter conversation between @zedshaw and @ioerror: http://nearmetter.com/ioerror/zedshaw (I'm in no way affiliate to NearMetter, it's just the best way I found to easily read a twitter conversation)

Bettween.com is good for this sort of thing, and looks like it does a better job of threading which tweets others are in reply to than NearMetter is doing.

http://bettween.com/ioerror/zedshaw

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

#85
post #44

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 ther…

> 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. You don't need TOR. You do need an ISP.

you need trust in both of them as a netizen, and I have trust in Tor, but not my ISP.

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

#86
post #76
post #24

Ad 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 re…

"The sky is blue."

"He's a Bayesian!"

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

#87
>The problem is that Tor's pedigree is less than stellar. First, it was originally a US Navy project then released to various "hackers" (a word which in a lot of ways is just synonymous with "NSA collaborator" or at least a wannabe). Whether the source code started there or just the idea, you have to ask why the hell the Navy would work on this and then release it.

Goodness me! We should also be examining that DARPA developed honeypot called Teh Internets and take a second look at that ominous collaborator Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

Once I got to Zed quoting Project Vigilant's volunteer count I had to laugh. Zed's bullshit detector needs a tune-up.

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

#88
post #24

Ad 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…

What he is talking about is not Ad Hominem but Conflict of Interest. For example, a judge is required to recuse him or herself from a case in which he or she has a personal interest, such as a business relationship with the plaintiff or defendant.

This is probably why Zed has the words "Conflict Of Interest" as a section heading in a very large font.

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

#89

"Wikileak's job is to take people's secrets and show them and who's hiding them to the world." Here we see the again the conflation of organizations and individuals in an opinion piece connected to Wikileaks. Why does this happen so regularly? I don't know anything about Appelbaum, but it's perfectly possible that he believes in personal privacy and institutional transparency, a not particularly radical, surprising,…

I'm tired of this argument as well - it also goes something like this:

"Assange has founded Wikileaks, so how dare he oppose leaking details of his alleged sex crimes trial!?"

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

#90

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…

This is why more people need to learn about and use steganography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography

Properly used, good steganographic software will hide your use of encryption. Ideally, your communication stream will seem perfectly innocuous to all observers.

Of course, in real life nothing is perfect. So there's always a chance your use of encryption will be detected. But using steganography properly should still reduce that chance to well below that of obviously encrypted systems like TOR, Freenet, etc.

Also, just as importantly, the more people use steganography, the greater the cost of widespread monitoring will become.

As pointed out in other replies in this thread, when you use regular encryption or systems like TOR, you're effectively raising a big red flag for anyone who cares to monitor your communication. So detection is really easy.

But if you use steganography, the snoopers will have to work much harder to even stand a chance of detecting that there's anything unusual about your communication. Multiply this by thousands or millions of people using steganography (especially if it's embedded in huge data transfers, like video streams) and the resource drain for effective, widespread monitoring could become unsustainable.

Right now the snoopers can go after the low-hanging fruit of obviously encrypted communications, and then maybe use rubber hose cryptanalysis to decrypt it, or simply block it. Steganography has the potential change the game drastically.

Here's some steganographic software for you:

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=steganography&section=pro...

http://www.jjtc.com/Steganography/tools.html

http://www.cotse.com/tools/stega.htm

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