Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 306 posts

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#181

Post by jt2190 »

class4behavior wrote: post #97
blaser-waffle wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it worth it to donate, or to just pool a little cash and start your own? Like, how do I know any of those links aren't the NSA? I ask because I have 5-6 Raspberry Pis, a couple retired Supermicro boxes, and old Cisco gear that isn't doing much...

>Like, how do I know any of those links aren't the NSA? Well, I've only linked to communities listed by the Tor Project itself. Otherwise, the same way you would check whether HN or your local tea store is the NSA. You do your own research, run your own risk analysis, and if you want to stay sane, by default you give people the benefit of the doubt. Generally, it's best not to run Tor relays from home as services wil…

> Like, how do I know any of those links aren't the NSA?

No communication channel can be guaranteed to be 100% secure in the broad sense, i.e. even One-Time Pads can be stolen, recipients of messages can be watched to see what they’re up to, etc.

Users of Tor should assume that the whole channel (not just the Tor part) can be compromised by a willing and capable adversary, and take additional precautions if they feel it’s necessary, e.g. “tradecraft” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradecraft

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#182

Post by JCharante »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #96
ur-whale wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is the kind of liability you take on when running a tor node on a machine that "belongs" to you (for some definition of belong). Another is to find a place that will agree to power your machine and allow it to hook in to the ethernet if it runs a tor node. At any rate, running a tor node isn't as simple as running apt-get.

BBC fights censorship in China, you would do the same by running a tor node.

I wonder what other places the BBC is blocked in. I know there's a DNS block in Viet Nam.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#183

Post by ToastyMallows »

bb123 wrote: post #116
uryga wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

offtopic, but how'd you get an emoji in a HN comment?? (maybe it doesn't get stripped bc the flag is encoded as [U][K], two "letterlike symbols" but still it's the first time i've seen one!)

I guess it is probably because most people are using desktops/laptops to browse HN. I feel like Emoji use on QWERTY keyboards is harder/less common. It is possible though: 🇺🇳

On Windows you can hit Win+; to pull up an emoji keyboard!

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#184

Post by pmarreck »

class4behavior wrote: post #51

Since no one posted that, yet: Tor relies on the size the of its network to counteract blocks, prevent take overs, and naturally ensure stability as well as performance. You can either donate to various groups running Tor servers, the developers, or take part on your own. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://donate.torproject.org…

How do I know that my computers won’t be used to traffic child porn, if I donate a server and some bandwidth?

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#185

Post by steeleduncan »

Potentially I am misunderstanding how Tor's onion routing works, but according to https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html there are about 6000 tor relays right now.

Surely if some well funded organisation (Eve) were to install a similar number of relays itself, then it is reasonably likely that for a given user a packet would eventually travel across relays solely owned by Eve, and at that point Eve could map a Tor address to a physical IP?

Operating 6000 nodes in a manner unlikely to cause suspicion , and correlating packets across those nodes, is a massive undertaking, but it seems that it would be well within the means of e.g. NSA.

Would this work, or am I missing something fundamental about how Tor works?

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#186

Post by justinmchase »

andrewaylett wrote: post #37

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…

I think the Brave Browser has this capability. It at least will allow you to create Private + Tor windows.

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#188

Post by proto-n »

pmarreck wrote: post #184
class4behavior wrote: post #51

Since no one posted that, yet: Tor relies on the size the of its network to counteract blocks, prevent take overs, and naturally ensure stability as well as performance. You can either donate to various groups running Tor servers, the developers, or take part on your own. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://donate.torproject.org…

How do I know that my computers won’t be used to traffic child porn, if I donate a server and some bandwidth?

I believe you can choose to be an exit relay or a middle relay. A middle relay only connects to other relays, it does not allow "outgoing" connections, i.e. you won't appear to be browsing child porn from the outside if that's what you mean.

If you mean that you don't want to relay traffic that carries child porn, than you can't do that, since you can't see what you are relaying (and even if you did, you'd need to automatically recognize it which is not easy afaik).

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#189

Post by papreclip »

pmarreck wrote: post #184
class4behavior wrote: post #51

Since no one posted that, yet: Tor relies on the size the of its network to counteract blocks, prevent take overs, and naturally ensure stability as well as performance. You can either donate to various groups running Tor servers, the developers, or take part on your own. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://donate.torproject.org…

How do I know that my computers won’t be used to traffic child porn, if I donate a server and some bandwidth?

They almost certainly will

Re: BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

#190

Post by blotter_paper »

blaser-waffle wrote: post #85
RandomGuyDTB wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Possibly the most famous darkweb URL.

I feel like Dread Pirate Roberts would have something to say about that.

I think GP means that facebook spent a lot of CPU cycles getting an onion address that is so human-readable/memorable; I don't remember what the old Silk Road's address was but I think I'd remember if it were silkroadcorewwwi.onion
Post reply on HN