Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.
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Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
51–60 of 104 posts
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.
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> Ten years ago the US Navy invented Tor, an anonymous web browser.
First release of Tor was in 2002 but it was started in the mid '90s according to Wikipedia.
The Tor Browser was initially released by the Tor project, not the US Navy, in 2008.
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#53I'm not a fan of this. Any chance Mullvad would offer a service plan where the money I'm paying them does NOT go to the support of Tor?
Why you are not fun of it? And why those concerns don't apply to Mullvad?
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#54I'm not a fan of this. Any chance Mullvad would offer a service plan where the money I'm paying them does NOT go to the support of Tor?
I'm a big fan of this and I am already a paying Mullvad customer :D
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.
Of course, this is basically why they invented it in the first place.
And why they open sourced it. All the fancy onion routing would be useless if the fact that you use it already identified you as a CIA spy. They need other people to use it as well for TOR to be useful to them.
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#56Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#57> Those that understand privacy, actively work to improve anti-fingerprinting and to protect users against more advanced attacks - are even fewer. > We believe that the Tor Project is one such organisation. We share their values when it comes to human rights, freedom of expression, anti-censorship and online privacy. The Tor Project is primarily funded by the State Department and DARPA. Make of that as you will.
This is brought up sometimes as some clever gotcha but Tor gets funding from many sources, and DARPA and the other US agencies that give money to Tor (like OTF) give on the order of 10s of thousands of US dollars per year. OTF (Open Technology Fund) — recently severely diminished — was funding tons of anti-censorship efforts like this with small grants to help get American propaganda into Iran, China, etc. Helping sp…
Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder.
At any rate, the USG has enormous leverage over the governance of Tor and that should worry anyone that pretends to care about their online privacy re: Tor.
Mullvad putting out PR about funding TP as a peer of the USG doesn't make TP look good, it makes Mullvad look seedy.
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#58Imagine using Mullvad VPN for entering Tor and realizing that your activity is transparent for Mullvad.
It's not transparent (or at least any more than any other means of accessing TOR). If you at all access the internet through somewhat normal means (without running your own ISP and connecting to an IXP physically) you are placing some level of trust in a service provider.
What these sort of VPNs do is allowing you to move that point of trust to another party than the one that maintains your intrastructure (your normal ISP). You do not give them any more trust than your normal ISP, but since your normal ISP is usually more regulated it is a good idea to scrutinize the VPN provider more.
I trust mullvad more than my normal ISP on privacy. mullvad is also one of the few VPN providers that has not sold its product as a end-all-be-all privacy solution while a lot of others have been spreading FUD (things like saying that your ISP can see in cleartext all your traffic even though 99% is over https, saying their products protect against hackers when there is no evidence for that, etc.).
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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> Ten years ago the US Navy invented Tor, an anonymous web browser. First release of Tor was in 2002 but it was started in the mid '90s according to Wikipedia. The Tor Browser was initially released by the Tor project, not the US Navy, in 2008. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)
The browser was a community project. The onion routing framework was a naval research lab thing.
Re: Mullvad becomes highest level of Tor Member (Shallot)
#60> Those that understand privacy, actively work to improve anti-fingerprinting and to protect users against more advanced attacks - are even fewer. > We believe that the Tor Project is one such organisation. We share their values when it comes to human rights, freedom of expression, anti-censorship and online privacy. The Tor Project is primarily funded by the State Department and DARPA. Make of that as you will.
> The Tor Project is primarily funded by the State Department and DARPA. Make of that as you will.
The Internet was funded by the US Gov and DARPA. Make of that as you will.