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 Browser 12.0
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Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#72The 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
#73Earlier 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?
Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#74Earlier 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You don't need (outdated) FOIA documents for that...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…
Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#75The 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…
Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#76Just 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?
Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#77I'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.
Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#78Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#79The 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…
Re: Tor Browser 12.0
#80Just 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.
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)