There don't seem to be any good choices here. Use normal Web browsers and you will get tracked/have your privacy invaded. Use Tor and you will look/get monitored like a terrorist. What do we do next?
We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
21–30 of 67 posts
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#22Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…
Sure, a lot more people would try it if Firefox made it easy. However, they might also stop using it pretty quickly if it's inconvenient.
Here's a similar experience I had: for a while I would open any news link shared on Hacker News in Incognito mode, but at this point it gets blocked so often there's not much point.
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#23And to continue with privacy oriented solutions that allow you to better avoid surveillance... -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail ( https://protonmail.com/ ) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk ) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple ( https://www.duple.io/en/ ) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal ( https://signal.org/ )
This reads like one of those articles where they list established services and casually include an unknown one. It's best to disclose your affiliation.
That's what it actually is. If you look at cloudyo's comment history, its all about Duple.
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#24The Tor browser helps with websites, but with a "privacy router" you can make sure connections from apps and the OS are routed as well. E.g. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glinet/mudi-4g-lte-priv...
I was excited about this concept a few years ago and talked it over with the Tor developers. Their concern is that the Tor Browser has an elaborate ongoing effort to prevent tracking by removing unique identifiers and isolating session state. A regular browser used through Tor would be extremely trackable because it wouldn't hide or isolate any of these things, and indeed you could associate Tor activity with non-Tor…
That still protects you from tracking on the local network and makes IP-based geolocation ineffective, which is not nothing.
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#25And to continue with privacy oriented solutions that allow you to better avoid surveillance... -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail ( https://protonmail.com/ ) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk ) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple ( https://www.duple.io/en/ ) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal ( https://signal.org/ )
Love Proton, DDG, and Signal. Use them all the time. Never heard of Duple. But, FWIW I use pCloud instead - it's a paid service (I bought a one-time lifetime license of 2TB of space).
pCloud's software is solid. I battle tested a number of other cloud services before selecting them. Their implementation is excellent - with virtually every other provider I found missing features or easily discovered bugs when putting them through the ringer in terms of testing.
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#26What if there was a browser extension that randomly selected, say, about 1% of requests to be routed through tor? Everybody using it would help make Tor safer, while being just minimally annoyed by the latency and the CAPTCHAs. Plus it might incentivize hosts to be less annoying to Tor users, if they saw a bigger fraction of legitimate traffic. I think I'd chip in and use it... Anything wrong with that idea?
It would be lacking the isolation and anti-tracking stuff that Tor Browser does, so the level of anonymity that users would get would be much worse. But it seems like in your proposal the users aren't expecting to get anonymity, so they wouldn't necessarily object when they don't get it.
Many clearnet sites would be extra-confused by seeing requests that are partially Tor and partially non-Tor (with subresources being requested from different locations). But the behavior isn't necessarily invalid in any way, so maybe sites should get used to it. :-)
I think the performance hit would be pretty considerable if you think about the optimization that some sites, browsers, and CDNs have been doing. If you imagine users who choose browsers (or sites) based on perceived speed, they might not react that well to deliberately slowing down connections for privacy.
(I think your idea is interesting.)
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#27What if there was a browser extension that randomly selected, say, about 1% of requests to be routed through tor? Everybody using it would help make Tor safer, while being just minimally annoyed by the latency and the CAPTCHAs. Plus it might incentivize hosts to be less annoying to Tor users, if they saw a bigger fraction of legitimate traffic. I think I'd chip in and use it... Anything wrong with that idea?
You might overload the tor network and annoy a lot of people with the slower and more unreliable connection that asks for wayyyy more captchas.
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#28And to continue with privacy oriented solutions that allow you to better avoid surveillance... -Alternative to Gmail: ProtonMail ( https://protonmail.com/ ) -Alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo ( https://duckduckgo.com/?t=hk ) -Alternative to Dropbox and GoogleDrive: Duple ( https://www.duple.io/en/ ) -Alternative to Whatsapp: Signal ( https://signal.org/ )
Just gonna toss StartPage (https://www.startpage.com/) out there as an alternative to Google.
DDG uses bing under the hood. StartPage proxies requests to Google. I've just personally found the latter to give better consistent results, particularly with my searches for technical/programming issues.
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#29There don't seem to be any good choices here. Use normal Web browsers and you will get tracked/have your privacy invaded. Use Tor and you will look/get monitored like a terrorist. What do we do next?
1.) Download (IceCat) or roll your own (FF+addons) security-focused browser
+ Very secure if done properly
+ Fully controllable/customizable
- Takes a considerable amount of time and energy to create & keep updated
- Unique combinations of addons exacerbate fingerprinting concerns
2.) Encourage anyone who cares about privacy to use Tor, with the aim of normalizing (de-terrorist-izing?) Tor traffic (think HTTP->HTTPS transition, HTTPS traffic was suspicious 15 years ago)
+ Most maintainable/viable long term solution
+ Standard configuration cripples some fingerprinting
+ Easy for anyone to set up and keep updated
- Concern regarding US intelligence controlling a large number of exit nodes and/or currently have the capability to de-anonymization Tor users
- Hard to get people to switch browsers
- Very hard to get people to switch to a slower browser
- Will take a while
Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance
#30If DARPA created the internet aren't there are all sorts of backdoors and systems we don't know about built in? I've never really understood - if you can - those fundamentals.
You should read up on the history of the internet. ARPA was funding researchers who ended up creating what we call the internet today. This doesn't mean it was "ordered" by Pentagon or something of that sort. Most of the ideas came from individuals acting on their own accord.