From around September 2022 to March 2023 media in Germany promoted the Snowflake Browser Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/torproject-snowf...) to help Iranians circumvent censorship. Is this a possible explanation?
Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
231–240 of 262 posts
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
IP blocking blocks most of the people on our local ISP. They are small, and use CGNAT, so one owned windows machine across town breaks sites like yours for everyone, and the root cause is extremely difficult to debug for end users. As much as I deeply, deeply dislike captchas, ip blocking is far worse.
IP blocks also just don't work on IPv6. Unless you're prepared to block entire by ASN, an adversary can cheaply just buy up a lot of address space and churn through them. It gets even messier when dealing with real ISP networks because some hand out /40s for residential customers whereas others give just a /56.
I'm sure you can buy a table that says what size subnet to block for various ipv6 ranges.
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
The interesting question is if there is a bot net spreading in Germany since the 17th of June. What would be the likelihood of that going undetected. If you like conspiracy theory, the rise in one country could point to state actors.
Off the top of my head - Germany hosts a disproportionate amount of sensitive data because it's the location of choice for cloud providers storing things for EU member countries. They have lots of fiber, lots of ISPs, plenty of datacenter space, a stable government, and data security laws that meet or exceed everyone else in the EU.
Germany hosts a disproportionate amount of sensitive data because it's the location of choice for cloud providers storing things for EU member countries.
One weird thing to me: You are right about "lots of fiber" -- specifically Frankfurt Internet Exchange is (was?) the busiest in the world for a long time. Why does non-urban, non-commercial (retail) Internet access suck so hard in Germany? It is the topic of endless (but understandable) crying by German residents on HN!
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#234Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
What state actor doesn’t understand statistical deanoymization attacks against tor? (e.g., if you single-handedly double the network traffic, then an outside observer can figure out what ingress/egress traffic is yours)
Why pay attention to this if you can simply blame another state actor? And German federal government have a history for covert shitposting.
And German federal government have a history for covert shitposting.
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only on my mobile data. They’re not actually 18+ sites though, for example someone’s blog that was posted here is blocked and it seems the Tor site is too But I think that’s a Vodaphone thing rather than a UK thing
So private companies are able to decide the websites their customers are allowed to access?
Pretty sure that’s true in the US too, though not common I don’t know of regulation otherwise. Please correct me if I’m wrong, anyone
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#237[flagged]
The traffic my servers receive from China, India, South America, Africa, and Eastern Europe, and the UK is also almost exclusively boys and exploit scanners. You can block whatever IP addresses you like but the bot to user ratio of any given IP address is absolutely terrible. Tor concentrates a lot of traffic into a few exit nodes but by this logic most small countries should be blocked from most websites.
Sadly for the concept of the Open Internet, plenty of sites either have or would consider blocking most countries besides their own and closely-linked neighbors e.g. US/CA, since they figure nobody in those other countries could be, say, legitimately placing a takeout order in Chicago, or entering an American contest, etc. So it’s all downside (malicious bots, DDOS etc) with no perceived benefit of allowing them. It’s sad, but it’s probably going to become even more common.
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an interesting argument. Not sure it would hold up. I don't think an IP alone counts as PII, since the ISP would have to be queried to actually get any contact info.
IP addresses are PII under GDPR.
Only of they are connected to a short list of more sensitive PII, of which "tor user" is not one.
IP logs are fully legal in the UE under GDPR and Tor deanonymization is just an IP log of connected users.
Also there is already plenty of research of this type out of the EU. It's quite common in infosec.
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's more defensible! Propaganda is far, far, less effective as a blind radio broadcast or air pamphlets than micro-targeted interactive sessions intricately engineered to maximize neurological reinforcement loops. Absolutely insidious.
Re: Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's more defensible! Propaganda is far, far, less effective as a blind radio broadcast or air pamphlets than micro-targeted interactive sessions intricately engineered to maximize neurological reinforcement loops. Absolutely insidious.
No, it's far less defensible, because people have the internet to look up and verify things as needed.
This kind of censorship is just nannying, which I'm generally against.
Then again, given how inept people are at thinking for themselves, maybe a nanny state is what's best.