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Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

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131–140 of 262 posts

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#131
post #6

Could these be attempts at data mining for unmasking Tor users?

It's not clear to me how you'd do that with clients, rather than relays.

DDOS a hidden service and track the request spike through your exit nodes. I think this is how the original silk road was investigated.

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No excuse for that censorship honestly.

Eliminating enemy propaganda is extremely common and a long running practice. It's less censorship and more self defense.

Looking at it from that perspective it makes a kind of sense, although I think it is less defensible in modern day with the internet.

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doubt it. Hetzners smallest machine is something like $4/month, additional IPv4 addresses come with extra cost. They have quite tight service quotas, and this 2M additional IPs would be almost their entire IPv4 pool.

I don’t know about the details, but I know Hetzner has quite a backstory with their servers being abused by spammers. I don’t know how the state is today, but maybe it’s not as unlikely as it seems?

If they even think you are spamming, you get banned. Pretty much closed to individuals (according to Reddit, if they don’t even like the way your ID looks, you’re banned) while businesses get more leeway to do things.

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#136

Does anyone understand the mass flagging and downvotes going on in this comment section? I'm very confused as I've never seen anything like it.

Just the usual political flamewar that happens here from time to time, not sure why it escalates on some threads and not on others though.

[deleted]

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about the details, but I know Hetzner has quite a backstory with their servers being abused by spammers. I don’t know how the state is today, but maybe it’s not as unlikely as it seems?

If they even think you are spamming, you get banned. Pretty much closed to individuals (according to Reddit, if they don’t even like the way your ID looks, you’re banned) while businesses get more leeway to do things.

I didn’t realize they’re that strict. I have an individual account with them I occasionally use and didn’t encounter any issues with ID (I can’t even recall being ID’d tbh). That being said, I am located in Germany and have a German billing address, so maybe international customers have more issues?

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#138

Is someone trying to compromise the Tor network? I read that Tor needs a certain percentage of non-malicious nodes to function, though I am not sure if that is applicable clients.

It's not applicable to clients. A clients traffic never touches another client, only the nodes.

Of course, malicious clients can ruin it for everyone else in the form of DoS attacks but that's clearly not happening here.

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#139
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems most likely, either by academics or government. Not really the most subtle way about it though and likely to face some response. I'd assume both have the capability to run a fairly accurate simulated network without anyone noticing so it's a bit strange.

I doubt it's either of those - it would be extremely unethical and illegal for academics to do, and governments don't need to take this approach because they have a bunch of systemic attacks that are less obvious. Perhaps someone with a botnet looking to sell unmasking, which has been popping up as a service recently. Or trying to use it against a specific DWM or vendor.

Mentioned it because there's been many papers which specifically used the live network to do such a thing already. Some researchers have spun up large numbers of relays in the past to conduct their work.

I personally don't see how it's unethical for either academics or governments to do this? Both have an interest in breaking tor, even when in the governments case where they both utilise it and want to know who else is using it.

The tor people themselves acknowledge the work in their blogs

https://blog.torproject.org/research-problem-measuring-safet...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314521450_Character...

Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany

#140

Clicking around and looking at the chart for random other countries shows a spike for Sweden too, whereas Finland has a different but interesting pattern all of its own.

Wonder if the fact that they’re related to NATO, who is at war, have anything to do with it.
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