There’s an “epubviewer” but no EPUB?
Fully open access PDF version free here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-D...
Though do consider buying it if you like it!
Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
21–30 of 100 posts
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#22> Wealth and power, the complicity of institutions, governments and communities that ignore the rights of children and disbelieve and disempower them—all of these provide far better privacy protections for child sex abusers than the Tor relay network ever could. Either the technology is good enough to make people anonymous despite their lack of wealth, power, complicity of institutions, or it's not. It can't be a wea…
Those are fair points. I would argue that it's not the tech that's weak, but that the protection that powerful people get from institutions, local networks, status in their communities etc. often give them so much access to practical power that they essentially don't need anonymity - because these institutions protect them.
In terms of condemning particular use cases (or deciding not to), I'm more trying to represent a particular argument that some people make about Tor (and lots of other technologies) - i.e. that the tech itself shouldn't carry explicit values/politics, those should all be down to the users. The argument is particularly strongly made by some privacy advocates as they see things like Tor becoming the foundations of a new Internet - and hence needing the broadest possible base of support. There's obviously a lot of good arguments against this philosophy, but I figured I should try to represent the different ways people think about Tor in as good faith as possible.
Obviously sometimes when people argue that they just have an issue with feminist values - sometimes it is definitely disingenuous. But I think there was a wider moment in the Tor community - in which a lot of people were concerned about the transition to a much more professional NGO, more strongly aligned with liberal, 'digital democracy' visions of US geopolitics, and away from a more chaotic and anarchic coalition. While I think there was a clear need for Tor to change and this was as much about its place amid wider changes in the landscape of digital rights, US tech, and hacker politics as anything else, it does give us a way (I think) of understanding the conflicts and choices that might emerge in Tor and other privacy enhancing infrastructures in the future.
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#23Cheers for this, I'm the author - AMA! :) A big motivation in writing the book was to feature the voices of the people we often don't hear from in the Tor community (which is why there's a whole chapter on the people who run the relays).
Also - it's completely free open access, but you can also buy a copy here if you like spending money: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262548182/tor/
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are your thoughts on the integrity of the network against state actors?
There's a lot in the book about this - it depends what you mean. Tor has a lot of social and technical design elements that try as best they can to minimise this risk. It would be pretty hard for intelligence services to compromise the Tor organisation in ways that meant they were deploying malicious code, for example. Plus, the way it's grown over the years has also given them some protections. In terms of deanonymi…
The rubber hose cyptography xocd comes to mind
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#25> Wealth and power, the complicity of institutions, governments and communities that ignore the rights of children and disbelieve and disempower them—all of these provide far better privacy protections for child sex abusers than the Tor relay network ever could. Either the technology is good enough to make people anonymous despite their lack of wealth, power, complicity of institutions, or it's not. It can't be a wea…
Those are fair points. I would argue that it's not the tech that's weak, but that the protection that powerful people get from institutions, local networks, status in their communities etc. often give them so much access to practical power that they essentially don't need anonymity - because these institutions protect them. In terms of condemning particular use cases (or deciding not to), I'm more trying to represent…
> because these institutions protect them.
All I am saying is that you could replace your antagonists in that line with "journalists" and you'd be like, "no wait, that's not true," and you'd be as wrong about journalists as anyone else.
Either there are some powerful institutions protecting journalists too, OR Tor is powerful enough to protect journalists. If it's not good enough for journalists, why bother? If it's good enough for journalists, listen, it's also good enough for criminals.
Anyway, some journalists are themselves powerful people! Maggie Haberman, John Carreyrou and Ronan Farrow are powerful people, and they don't need anonymity. There are powerless criminals too, I'm sure, who need anonymity to engage in criminal conduct without getting caught. You could live on an island with a Starlink Internet connection, literally divorced from institutions and communities, and you could engage in anonymous criminal activity with Tor, it would be your only way of doing that. It would be practicable and realistic. Where we really disagree is: I think the average person already lives in a metaphorical island, this isn't a fringe opinion, and thus no matter what they are doing, Tor is providing them not with anonymity - they are already anonymous in almost all ways that matter, already nobody cares what the average person is up to - Tor is providing them protection from law enforcement.
> chaotic and anarchic coalition
Those high drama characters were the only ones foolish enough to run exit nodes or relays. I am confident this is true but I have not investigated: not a single professional NGO employee or grant recipient, living in New York or Los Angeles, under the age of 40, is personally running a Tor exit node.
Those professionals are absolutely correct in their assessment that they would receive a much harsher punishment for so much as breathing on the third rail criminal activity on Tor compared to their colleagues who engage in some civil disobedience on highways here or there. And without exit nodes or relays, there's no Tor.
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#26Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#27One thing I'm curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node? If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?
There are no incentives. I'm pretty sure the vast majority does it for altruistic reasons. At least all those I've met. Many run relays with spare resources they pay for anyway. Others rent a cheap VPS to run a relay. $10 gives you a surprisingly large amount of bandwidth if you avoid the cloud like the plague. Governments have other possibilities. Why should they run a relay if they can force the ISP to mirror the t…
Governments dont have authority outside of their borders. They cannot force foreign ISP to give over the same information. Therefore they could only mirror nodes on IP addresses issued to companies in their country.
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#28One thing I'm curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node? If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?
People can do things altruistically - there doesn't always need to be a bitcoin-style monetary incentive. Lots of people run exit nodes because they believe in privacy and freedom of information. That said, you're absolutely right about large entities being able to control a large number of nodes, which is why a great number of nodes are controlled by governments trying to do so and also prevent foreign adversaries f…
> People can do things altruistically - there doesn't always need to be a bitcoin-style monetary incentive.
For a few years Oniontip [1] allowed tipping Tor relay operators with Bitcoin. In my opinion that was a quite nice combination of technologies, as it allowed to anonymously tip operators of a service providing anonymity on the internet.
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#29One thing I'm curious about Tor: What are the incentives for running a node? If there are no monetary incentives, then how does it achieves decentralization? Also, what stops a malicious actor with enough resources (a government) from controlling a big portion of the network?
I have no significant knowledge of how TOR works, so I might be off the mark here. Perhaps one incentive is that by running your own node, you can utilize it as an entry or exit node for your own activities over TOR. By controlling either the entry or the exit node, you know that a bad actor does not control both of the nodes involved in your own usage. Just a thought. Maybe this strategy is flawed somehow. Please chime in and correct me if you see a flaw in this strategy.
Re: Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fully open access PDF version free here: https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5761/TorFrom-the-D... Though do consider buying it if you like it!
Is there an EPUB for sale somewhere?
Aye absolutely - some links here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744367/tor-by-ben-c...