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We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

blog.torproject.org

51–60 of 67 posts

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#51
post #3

Can 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…

> but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used

This is quite wrong

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#52
post #8

You want to help? Add a native .onion address to websites you work on. You save bandwidth and contribute to normalization.

To add to this, with v3 onion services you can designate your site as a single-hop rendezvous if your service doesn't need to be truly "hidden". This helps reduce latency significantly.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#53
post #3

Can 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…

> but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used This is quite wrong

FWIW I'm not. I believe the "some % of a speed tested value" covers that scenario though. It's not a hard problem.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#54
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anybody know of any other privacy-oriented Dropbox/Drive alternatives?

Nextcloud is a wonderful bit of FLOSS, been using it for years now.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#55
post #3

Can 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…

And leading to wide swaths of users being banned from tons of sites that use one of the many publicly-available tor banlists for some reason they have zero understanding of.

Or make banning tor unpalatable.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#56
post #30

If 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.

Very aware of the history of the ietf public internet, and the US Military Network (MILNET) for Unclassified traffic Defense Secure Network One (DSNET 1) for Secret traffic Defense Secure Network Two (DSNET 2) for Top Secret traffic Defense Secure Network Three (DSNET 3) for Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI).

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? That's one thing I really like about Brave. There's an option for a private Tor session.

Sending traffic over Tor and using the Tor browser are different things: The former is just a proxy, the latter an anonymity tool. Is Brave doing the former or the latter?

I'm confused as to what you are trying to say. When you use the Tor browser, it sends all your traffic over the Tor network. That's how it keeps you anonymous. Perhaps you are thinking of hidden services.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? That's one thing I really like about Brave. There's an option for a private Tor session.

Sending traffic over Tor and using the Tor browser are different things: The former is just a proxy, the latter an anonymity tool. Is Brave doing the former or the latter?

i run security at Brave and here's the answer from Taylor, our lead Tor dev:

Using the Tor network is one part of internet anonymity, serving to conceal where you are. But using the Tor network does no good if the application helpfully adds X-My-Actual-IP-Address: 123.45.67.8 to every HTTP request, and browsers tend to do a lot of things like that which we have to play whack-a-mole with. What we implement in Brave is somewhere between (a) naively just setting a SOCKS proxy, like you can do in vanilla Firefox or Chromium, and (b) mimicking everything about the Tor Browser and following the Tor Browser Design Document to the letter (https://2019.www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/). So, while you are right that there's more to Tor and that we're not the Tor Browser (and that's why we are careful to say 'private windows with Tor' and not 'Tor windows', per agreement with the Tor Project about branding), there's also more to what Brave does than just setting a SOCKS proxy like in Firefox or Chromium and leaving it at that.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sending traffic over Tor and using the Tor browser are different things: The former is just a proxy, the latter an anonymity tool. Is Brave doing the former or the latter?

I'm confused as to what you are trying to say. When you use the Tor browser, it sends all your traffic over the Tor network. That's how it keeps you anonymous. Perhaps you are thinking of hidden services.

Tor Browser does more than just proxying. See my response above.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#60

Didn't FBI track down and catch Dread Pirate Roberts despite all the Tor network/browser anonymity? Did he do something stupid to break his anonymity or did FBI break Tor in some way?

Ross Ulbricht made some mistakes by reusing account names etc that he had made on the clearnet[0, 1]. But at the time there were (tinfoil-hat-wearing) folks that thought that this was actually parallel construction and Tor was backdoored. Here is the relevant section from the Times article on the IRS agent that figured it out: """ Mr. Alford’s preferred tool was Google. He used the advanced search option to look for…

The Silk Road guy was using _GMail_ ? Heh. Interesting.
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