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Is Tor still safe to use?

blog.torproject.org

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Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#251

Post by [deleted] »

throwaway37821 wrote: post #178
sigmoid10 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Surely eventually I'm going to get a hit where all three nodes in the circuit are my nodes that are logging everything? The word "eventually" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's say you actually manage to add 1000 servers to the tor network somehow without getting detected. The network currently sits at just under 8000 nodes. For simplicity, lets also ignore that there are different types of nodes and geogra…

75% [0] of all Tor nodes are hosted within 14 Eyes [1] countries, so it would actually be quite trivial for the NSA to de-anonymize a Tor user. It baffles me that Tor Browser doesn't provide an easy way to blacklist relays in those countries. [0] Here, you can do the math yourself: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#aggregate/all [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes#Fourteen_Eyes > Edit: For all the cynics…

[deleted]

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#252

Post by archsurface »

ziddoap wrote: post #131
archsurface wrote: post #128

The more privacy the better as far as I'm concerned, but I've never used tor. What are people using tor for? General comms, piracy (mild illegal), other (very illegal), ...?

> other (very illegal), ...? I will be waiting patiently for people to admit that they do very illegal things over Tor.

They don't have to be admissions, reports are an option.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#253

Post by throwme0827349 »

adamrezich wrote: post #209
throwing_away wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just unintentionally highlighted the need for the tor project and outreach to inform people about it.

Not to make too much light of a morbid topic but the idea of someone having a murderous yet tech-savvy ex who has methodically installed all sorts of elaborate digital surveillance measures in their former spouse's personal tech stack in service of premeditated homicide, sitting in a dark room somewhere, howling in anger upon realizing his murder plan has (somehow...?) been thwarted by said former spouse unexpectedly…

Stop thinking about cloak and dagger shit and start thinking about things ordinary people could do if they had a psychotic obsession, and nothing better to do with 120 hours a week of their time.

Stalkers want to make it impossible to live a normal life. They try to make it impossible to go to work or school, to use phones, email, messaging services, etc. Already knew my contact info, and got new ones by asking mutual friends. Called the the landline and cell and work phone and hung up or heavy-breathed into the phone hundreds of times a day. Telco won't help with this or admit who's doing it w/o a subpoena, which I couldn't realistically get. They tried to get various online accounts, including employer provided, to be flooded/brigaded/spamed/banned.

You don't have to be a leet haxor to do social engineering, sim swapping, and other crying on the phone to customer service type of attacks on other people's accounts. You just have to be pissed off and risk tolerant.

Not saying tor is a good-fit solution to these problems, just saying that "Because your ex-spouse wants to murder you", and also you have a day-to-day practical necessity to find a secure, hard to block way to communicate on, or access, the internet is not actually an exotic problem.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#254

Post by MR4D »

I’m a tor novice, so please excuse the simplistic question…

Couldn’t a national security organization just modify a node to route traffic to other nodes it controls instead of uncontrolled nodes?

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#255

Post by andai »

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #235
bragr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This could cost less than $5000 for a month I ran a bunch of nodes for a couple years and that's optimistic by perhaps an order of magnitude. No $5 a month VPS provides enough bandwidth to sustain the monthly traffic of a Tor node, and nodes need to be continuously online and serving traffic for about 2-3 months[1] before they will be promoted to guard relays. Throttling traffic to stay in your bandwidth allocation…

Still easily within the budget of the US, Russia, China, Israel, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if a majority of nodes are ran by intelligence agencies.

They say the internet is just someone else's computer. With Tor it's the computer of a person who wants you to think it's not their computer, and also that they aren't paying attention to (or somehow can't see) what you're doing on it.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#256

Post by tg180 »

MR4D wrote: post #254

I’m a tor novice, so please excuse the simplistic question… Couldn’t a national security organization just modify a node to route traffic to other nodes it controls instead of uncontrolled nodes?

No!

The client controls path selection, and each hop is verified using its encryption keys.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#257

Post by fsckboy »

alt187 wrote: post #237
fsckboy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you implying that Tor is not used for illegal or immoral purposes? (I took out the primarily that you threw in to make your argument stronger because that made my argument stronger, and I took out your scare quotes because morality doesn't scare me)

What's a scare quote?

did your search button break? lmgtfy

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=scare+quotes

this is a helpful answer, downvoting it would be extremely bad form

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#258

Post by andai »

jstanley wrote: post #13

The best attack against Tor is convincing people not to use it. If anyone tries to convince you Tor is not safe, ask yourself: cui bono?

Someone tries to convince you a room totally isn't bugged and that you should have private conversations in it. (A room designed by the US military, incidentally...)

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#259

Post by andai »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #137

I am interested in the “legitimate” uses for tor. I have not kept up with this but I understand it was designed by US Navy to make it hard for oppressive regiemes to track their citizens use of web. What do we want Tor for except as a hope that Russian citizens might be able to get to the BBC site? I am asking honestly - and would prefer not to be told my own government is on the verge of a mass pogrum so we had bett…

Are there legitimate arguments in favour of privacy, and private communications? It seems to be largely the same issue.

We've come to accept (as a normal mainstream thing) end to end encryption in several popular messaging apps (which seems to be largely thanks to WhatsApp?), but the same idea applied to web browsing is still considered fringe for some reason. That distinction seems arbitrary to me, like just a cultural thing?

It might be a UX thing though. WhatsApp is pleasant. Trying to use the internet normally over Tor is horrendous (mostly thanks to Cloudflare either blocking you outright, or sending you to captcha hell).

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#260

Post by lapphi »

ciiiicii wrote: post #114
mass_and_energy wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implication of the right to privacy being unnecessary because you have nothing to hide is akin to declaring the right to free speech unnecessary because you have nothing to say. The ability to maintain privacy and anonymity is not for today, it's for tomorrow.

I don't think many people seriously think that terrorists planning attacks to maim and kill people, and pedophiles sharing child sexual abuse imagery with each other, have an absolute right to privacy in such communications, nor that doing so is an example of free speech. Really it's a good thing that the "global adversary" is - almost certainly - keeping tabs on Tor traffic and tracking down who is responsible for t…

You sound like a stalin era communist. The secret police are spying on you for your own good!
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