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Tor Browser 12.0

blog.torproject.org

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Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#61

Post by yucky »

HackerNCoder wrote: post #50
yucky wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also the inescapable fact that Tor was created by US Intelligence, specifically the US Naval Research Lab[0]. And according to FOIA documents it continues to receive a huge chunk of funding & resources from US Intelligence, particularly from the United States Agency for Global Media (formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors), which supervises our propaganda channels Voice of America and Radio Free Europe…

You don't need (outdated) FOIA documents for that... Go to https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ and you will see that they get money from the US government, if you want to know more about how much, go check the IRS 990 forms [1] or check the blog post that explains the 990, it also gives clear percentages on how much comes from where, [2] [1] https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/ [2] https://blog.torproject…

This part appears to be missing from the Tor website:

> 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a Central Intelligence Agency spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US government.

So the documents acquired via FOIA requests are worth reading, and it's worth discussing why the US Intelligence community has such an active interest in propping up Tor.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#62

Post by chefandy »

optimalsolver wrote: post #9

The inescapable fact about Tor is that its traffic patterns make you stand out prominently. Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look. All well and good if you’re just maintaining a cookie recipe site on the dark web, but it’s rarely ever that, is it?

A colleague at a former academic job was questioned by campus police because he was one of a handful of people on the university network connected to TOR when a bomb threat was submitted (I forget how, though) from an IP address running a TOR exit node. Bomb threats from students were pretty common during exams, so after the cops saw that it was our very privacy conscious dev ops guy they didn't pursue him as a suspect. If the person who did it connected to TOR from the university network to submit a bomb threat to duck an exam, they definitely deserve to get caught. I think that qualifies as "just enough knowledge to be dangerous."

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#63

Post by sasattack »

mothsonasloth wrote: post #25
sasattack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could we maybe not on this website use the term glowie considering it's explicitly sourced from a neo nazi and a phrase involving the n word. seems like maybe not real in line with HN rules....

It originated from Terry Davis the creator of TempleOS, but okay I get your point.

True I miss remembered the details. but it has been so amplified by neo nazis that wikitionary sources them as popularizing it .

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#64

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sterlind wrote: post #34
sasattack wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also you are providing cover to agents of US intelligence who use it

iirc IC still mostly uses burner shell companies for IPs, at least for running ops. Tor is fine for innocuous browsing but Tor exit nodes will stick out like a sore thumb in the victim's logs or IDS.

I'm not someone who looks at a lot of server logs, but what characterises entries as being from Tor?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#65

Post by shaky-carrousel »

optimalsolver wrote: post #9

The inescapable fact about Tor is that its traffic patterns make you stand out prominently. Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look. All well and good if you’re just maintaining a cookie recipe site on the dark web, but it’s rarely ever that, is it?

It is, in my case. All my system updates run over Tor. I do it to generate noise.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#66

Post by jerheinze »

optimalsolver wrote: post #9

The inescapable fact about Tor is that its traffic patterns make you stand out prominently. Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look. All well and good if you’re just maintaining a cookie recipe site on the dark web, but it’s rarely ever that, is it?

You can use pluggable transports to camouflage your traffic (they're already built into the Tor Browser, e.g. snowflake, obfs4 ...).

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#67

Post by pbhjpbhj »

nirvgorilla wrote: post #53
deadfromtor wrote: post #7

Just FYI that HN is very anti-tor. I made this account via Tor just now to prove the point. It will be dead by default (unless someone "vouches" for it). It's a very user-hostile stance that HN takes (along with not letting you delete your account). It really makes you wonder what they're doing with all this data? Doxxing is almost a given.

Yup. Suspicious just like when reddit became hostile to Tor. It's also a violation of the spirit of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about this in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American that any walled off website that blocks you from accessing it is unacceptable because it's not the web anymore.

For me old.reddit.com seems to work just as well with or without Tor (eg via Brave). The website served at the raw domain barely functions IME, so perhaps that's where the issue lie?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#68

Post by jerheinze »

shaky-carrousel wrote: post #65
optimalsolver wrote: post #9

The inescapable fact about Tor is that its traffic patterns make you stand out prominently. Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look. All well and good if you’re just maintaining a cookie recipe site on the dark web, but it’s rarely ever that, is it?

It is, in my case. All my system updates run over Tor. I do it to generate noise.

This is one of the main reasons why I keep using Tor daily. The more people use Tor for normal browsing, the less interesting it becomes to be a Tor user, the better the anonymity for everyone else.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#69

Post by shaky-carrousel »

mypastself wrote: post #58
time_to_smile wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it’s rarely ever that, is it? Maybe I'm unique, but my dark net activity is usually pretty tame. The number one reason I use Tor is because browsing onion sites reminds a bit more of how the web used to be in the late 1990s. Lot's of garbage of course, but a lot more serendipitous discovery than the web today. Because of its anonymous nature Onion sites are inherently resistant to being swallowed whole by adver…

If I may ask (provided you’re comfortable with disclosing) what kind of content do you find there that’s genuinely interesting?

Personal blogs in my case. I find a similar landscape on Gemini. I really dislike the noise proeuced by ad-sponsored websites.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#70

Post by pbhjpbhj »

super256 wrote: post #28
jbm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't emailing @dang be against the purpose of Tor, which is to enhance privacy?

> Wouldn't emailing @dang be against the purpose of Tor, which is to enhance privacy? Just use webmail in your tor browser. And don't send it from your main gmail, but create a throwaway.

Neither Google search nor YouTube seem to work (other than very sporadically, presumably if they've not had chance to block an IP yet) over Tor, does GMail?
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