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Tor Browser 12.0

blog.torproject.org

71–80 of 230 posts

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#71

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?

Even if you run it over a VPN connection?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#72
post #71

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?

Even if you run it over a VPN connection?

Yes, you just stand out to the VPN provider instead of your ISP. The VPN traffic itself makes you stand out to your ISP but in a different way.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#73

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?

While not Tor, I browse I2P websites from time to time. tracker2.postman.i2p is a great torrent tracker if I want to easily get access to leaked material I read in the news about. And planet.i2p to see newly "registered" websites. Content on those websites vary, but I've stumbled upon a couple of blogs, ranging from the mundane, to conspiracy theory blogs, which are also fun to read. It really does give you that 90s internet feeling.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#74
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need (outdated) FOIA documents for that...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…

[deleted]

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#75
post #37

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?

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…

AFAIK there are US intelligence agencies that rely on and use Tor for their agents abroad and US intelligence agencies that try to break it for their own reasons.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#76
post #54

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.

Does that restriction go away after you get enough reputation? Or does every single comment need to be vouched for even after several have been posted and accumulated upvotes?

The former.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#77

I'm surprised that they haven't bundled Arti, their Rust-based tor client implementation. I will say I am thankful for Tor Browser, but any JavaScript-enabled browser seems like the wrong choice for privacy and security.

Arti doesn't even support hidden services yet.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#78
Regardless of the issues with TOR itself, or the areas where I disagree with Tor Browser's approach, I love the project anyway because they're great about identifying and tracking all the things Firefox does that could put our privacy at risk. Having more eyes on Firefox update after update is wonderful and I've been incorporating many of their setting changes for years. I hope they can keep doing what they do for a long time!

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#79

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?

Tor can be made substantially less obvious if you make sure the bitrate and packet timings over each 'hop' of users connections are fixed. Eg. each client sends out 1000 1 kbyte packets per second to each peer, once per millisecond. Inside each packet, they send the onion encrypted user data. The rest of the packet is filled with rand(). Without that protection, any network attacker can do packet size and timing anal…

Is that individually tunable, or are you suggesting something that the project would have to change in their code?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#80

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.

The restrictions go away after a while, and in the meantime users can vouch for the comments that aren't trolling or spam. They did exactly that for your comment here, as well as for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898410.

This seems to me a reasonable design that balances the competing concerns. I like that both of these comments turned into examples of the system working properly. It's true that they had to wait a little before getting unkilled*, but that's not "very anti-tor" nor "very user-hostile".

(* 20 minutes and 10 minutes, respectively)

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