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Tor Browser 12.0

blog.torproject.org

141–150 of 230 posts

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#141
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly - and I've noticed there aren't very many exit nodes at all, small enough that I can start to recognize them by name.

Yea, there is only about 1000 (actually 1300, I just checked) exits - out of only ~6000 nodes total, the Tor network is actually kinda small.

So I guess the question is, how would one scale the number of nodes? Isn't that really what's needed then?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#142

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?

The Brave browser has around 60 million MAUs and has Tor bundled with it, so Tor traffic is unlikely to stand out as much as before.

This is a wrong conception. Using tor without Tor browser will make you stand out much more, since you're using a different browser. Not talking about non-browsers connections.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on then, no need to be coy.

For example, once or twice people called me (somehow) and asked why I was hacking their websites. I tried to explain, but I doubt I convinced anyone.

May I ask: That wasn't enough for you to stop operating a Tor node? People were abusing others thanks to your specific personal efforts and you just said: "eh, it's still worth it". How do you determine that it's still worth it?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#144

I once spoke with someone who knew someone who ran an exit node in Europe. He told crazy stories with police knocking every once in a while. Also the legal structure to do that was tricky, because you want to avoid the police searching your house; you'd also like tl spread responsability on multiple shoulders. So you have to create a kind of non-profit organization and run the exit node through that. It's very hard w…

I'm running exits since about 9 months. Have been running non exits for over a decade before. The exits are run by a non-profit (a Swiss Verein) and use the recommended setup like described in the blog post. The ISP knows it's an exit, it has a page on port 80 describing it and a PTR record that contains tor-exit. No contact with the police till now. If you would like to support the Tor network but don't want to run…

Thanks for doing this. Early 2010s, I provided free wifi when I lived across the street from a subsidized housing block. I tunneled all their traffic through Tor (including DNS via a hacky script).

I was too much of a coward to take the risk of the police breaking down my door because of something done by some random person using the free wifi. Thanks to others like you who were braver than I was, a bunch of folks had free Internet access.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#145
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the Tor feature of Brave is an optional setting, so I assume only a small fraction of their MAU use it.

It’s not a setting, it’s like their version of an incognito tab. You can right click a link to “open in tor”

I don't see this on Android. I also can't seem to locate any related settings.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, once or twice people called me (somehow) and asked why I was hacking their websites. I tried to explain, but I doubt I convinced anyone.

May I ask: That wasn't enough for you to stop operating a Tor node? People were abusing others thanks to your specific personal efforts and you just said: "eh, it's still worth it". How do you determine that it's still worth it?

Do you make the same overclever statements when someone abuses freedom of the press?

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The inescapable fact about Tor is that its traffic patterns make you stand out prominently. I'm curious as to how it stands out. I can imagine a few things, like an ISP seeing traffic to known TOR intermediary nodes, or maybe analyzing packets to look for some sort of handshake? > Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look. Sort of. But what would looking do? What…

I don't know if this is true, but I've read that if you plug in the tracking number for a package at USPS.com through Tor, the package will be flagged for inspection.

Source? Because this reeks of urban myth FUD.

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#148
post #134

All comments here focus on extreme cases: The police viewing you as a possible suspect, FBI becoming interested in you etc. Here is a much more mundane problem: Using Tor (even a VPN) while logging in to most big Silicon Valley firma that make money with your data (LinkedIn, Facebook, Tinder etc.) will result in your profile being suspended REAL FAST with the only way out to upload your gov't ID, i.e. complete deanon…

weird that facebook would suspend you for using tor when they have an official onion service.

It's a similar story with Twitter. I guess those onion services should be seen more as "censorship-resistant funnels to siphon your data" rather than anonymous ways to use the service. (Although I'm not sure how many situations there are where Facebook is blocked but Tor is accessible.)

Re: Tor Browser 12.0

#150

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…

I'm not sure if only the client does the padding, or if the padding also occurs at intermediate hops, but Tor does randomly pad traffic by default (from manpage of torrc):

       CircuitPadding 0|1
           If set to 0, Tor will not pad client circuits with additional cover
           traffic. Only clients may set this option. This option should be
           offered via the UI to mobile users for use where bandwidth may be
           expensive. If set to 1, padding will be negotiated as per the
           consensus and relay support (unlike ConnectionPadding,
           CircuitPadding cannot be force-enabled). (Default: 1)

       ReducedCircuitPadding 0|1
           If set to 1, Tor will only use circuit padding algorithms that have
           low overhead. Only clients may set this option. This option should
           be offered via the UI to mobile users for use where bandwidth may
           be expensive. (Default: 0)
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