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BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

bbc.co.uk

81–90 of 306 posts

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#81
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way to do that is just to use Tor Browser as your regular browser.

I know it is based on Firefox, do they keep updated with upstream?

Yes, they base Tor browser upon the latest Firefox ESR so it has the same security fixes as that...

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This allows anyone that has access to TOR to read BBC. Many countries might block outside news organizations.

Yes I understand that. 1 - Can the same not be achieved via VPN usage? 2 - Can TOR browsers not already access the BBC in the "clearnet"? 3 - Why do I, as a UK resident, have to provide money so that someone in Vietnam can access our state news?

> 3 - Why do I, as a UK resident, have to provide money so that someone in Vietnam can access our state news?

Up until a few years ago you didn't.

In the news + current affairs genre there was

1) UK output (Huw Edwards, News24, Panorama, etc) -- licence fee funded

2) World service (mainly radio, in a variety of languages) -- funded direct from the foreign office

3) World News TV (English language TV station) -- commercially funded

However the government of the time told the BBC they had to continue to fund World Service, but stopped the grant in aid. This meant that Doris in Dudley had to pay for Radio Hausa broadcasting from Abuja. Hausa is good for the UK (soft power), but it should be funded by the foreign office.

To add confusion, a couple of years ago the government then decided to invest £300m over 4 years to expand the world service reach - this money came from the foreign office.

Then there's more confusion. Many reporters for world service are expected to file into UK news too. If there's a news story in Vietnam that breaks, it will be nominally world service reporters who are on the scene reporting. Even if it's a planned event, like the Trump/Kim summit, local WS staff will be planning and often staffing that event, even if Huw Edwards is flown out to cover it, so there is still a tangential benefit

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#83
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because the Tor Browser sends all traffic through the tor network and exit nodes.

Why is that bad, per se ? In practice some sites drop Tor connections, and localisations come through wrong, but that doesn't seem to be why you said "no".

In my experience, the limiting factor is speed. Tor is not exactly the fastest protocol in the world, and while streaming video over Tor has gotten better over time, it's still not what I'd call ideal. For regular browsing, the loss of speed is inconvenient enough to annoy the average user, myself included.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#84
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally a good use for my license fee! While I agree that no news corporation should ever be censored and should be accessible to all including the "dark-web", the level of clickbait / fake-news level content on the BBC website is getting ridiculous in some areas and contradicts with their duty to be fair, impartial and balanced as the only UK state broadcaster privileged with a royal charter. Apart from the actual…

They seem to have made it their task to report in depth on every single violent crime in the country. Being from Germany and having never lived in the UK, this is weird to me. For a crime to end up on tagesschau.de (the German equivalent to bbc.co.uk/news ) it needs to be of... well... national interest. This just seems like yellow press, honestly. Or is there something I'm missing? edit: also their "reporting" on an…

They say the BBC bend to the wishes of the current government, they seem in recent years to be bending towards the Daily Mail, using fear-mongering to attract clicks and viewers, ignoring climate change protests to not put off car owners. Joining in with the newspapers by smearing anyone who speaks against the Tory party.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#86
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Finally a good use for my license fee! While I agree that no news corporation should ever be censored and should be accessible to all including the "dark-web", the level of clickbait / fake-news level content on the BBC website is getting ridiculous in some areas and contradicts with their duty to be fair, impartial and balanced as the only UK state broadcaster privileged with a royal charter. Apart from the actual…

They seem to have made it their task to report in depth on every single violent crime in the country. Being from Germany and having never lived in the UK, this is weird to me. For a crime to end up on tagesschau.de (the German equivalent to bbc.co.uk/news ) it needs to be of... well... national interest. This just seems like yellow press, honestly. Or is there something I'm missing? edit: also their "reporting" on an…

I don't regard them as serious news service now. On the normal national news slots they present a dumbed-down precis of what the Government would like you to hear. For serious new coverage we watch Channel 4 News which isn't afraid to cover controversial and government-critical topics.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The BBC is quite subtle. It's not fake news and what they report is factual, but the choice of what facts to report makes it crystal clear that they do have an agenda. A current example: Hongkong. They have headline reporting every time there is a protest while other protests in other countries, and arguably much more significant protests, barely get a mention. This is not a coincidence. Edit: A lot of the replies to…

Hong Kong is a very recent former British colony, the nature of the protests are unique and there's a large public interest in the Hong Kong protests specifically. This doesn't mean the BBC isn't biased, but the number of articles isn't an indication of bias in the way that people would normally use the term I think. How are you measuring the significance of protests against each other to figure out which deserve mor…

Bingo. HK was a colony and there are a lot of British citizens who became that way via that colonial dominion. It's more relevant to the UK than, say, protests in Peru.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#88
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do this in Firefox. Open about:config and search "dotonion". Toggle it. The other arrangements are left up to you.

But this will need you to start the Tor deamon separately and configure the two I guess? Not as simple as just using Tor browser, or a Tor tab in Brave...

It's pretty straightforward.

1. Run the service.

2. Disable blocking onion in about:config.

3. In firefox set manual proxy and enable proxy dns for socks5.

Done :D

Takes all of two mins.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#90

I know there are good reasons why it's not fully secure, but I'd really like to be able to access `.onion` addresses in my regular browser over TOR and everything else directly as usual. In _this_ I'm not over-worried about the risk of deanonymisation as my aim is on one hand access to resources I don't have access to now and on the other hand legitimisation of TOR as something that anyone could reasonably use, even…

Privacy Browser on Android does that - you can choose which sites are accessed over Tor and a lot more (searching with DDG via Tor, access Facebooks onion address).. Highly configurable..

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.stoutner.privacybrowser....

https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser/

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