A Tor of the Dark Web

I see what you're saying, but doesn't somebody, somewhere have to look at it to make sure it is CP first?

Let me put on my tin foil hat for a moment: Tor being anonymous, there is no way to know whether what you saw was a.) authentic content created (mostly) by actual child molesters b.) excellent copy written to cause maximum outrage against tor by some entity that does not like tor c.) somewhere in between, e.g. making sure that you actually stumble upon CP every once in a while when using onion sites

While b is not very probable, I can actually imagine that c is a pretty easy option to put many decent people off using tor.

Sure you can catch some by that, but what then? The remainder will be resistant, and very used to how to phrase things, and also noticing attempts to play them into giving something away. We're also talking about people who exchange tips on how to get at actual children, remember, and you can do that fine without giving anything away. It's like open source, no strings attached, works fine with dead mailboxes.

Unless an actual law enforcement person involved with this confirms it's usually that easy, I file all of this under rationalizations... understandable ones, but still. Because yeah, this stuff can mess you up, and we always seek to return to normality.

It's very easy to say all this until you visited those places. I wouldn't want to, I remember trying to talk with pedophiles in a public, above-board forum, (where they were of course always beating around the bush, it was all about "simply loving children", who have a right to be loved blah blah), and I couldn't even take that for more than one post, I read the replies and thought fuck this, fuck you people, I don't need this in my brain. But that was harmless - the dark, uninhibited underbelly of that? WHOA. I wouldn't have the nerve to read an hour of that - just talking about text here, that's enough for me kthxbye :/ - but I take it seriously, because I think I can kinda imagine how it might be. I know just ranting about it also pointless, but I also disagree with hand-waving it away.

Tor is the solution to getting hellbanned at HN.

That is "censorship", no?

Tor is also the solution to your Twitter API woes. Like it or not. I'm sure many SEO people use it to get around Google's restrictions. These are not necessarily uses that infringe anyone's IP. Twitter is UGC. And Google caches the entire web, indiscriminantly.

Tor, like the 'net itself, is controversial. It can be used for bad things. It can also be used for good things. It could be used to break criminal laws, or to enable copyright infringment. It could be used to violate TOS that may or may not be enforceable in civil court. Or it could be used just to evade idiosyncratic censorship by some webmaster that has no legal basis whatsoever. (This comment itself is being posted through Tor.) It is, however, any way you look at it, useful.

There may be an "intended purpose" for Tor. But as with almost all software, that means little. Users decide how they will use it. And that is unpredictable.

Did the folks at MIT, when they developed Tor, say to themselves, "You know, this will be used to commit crime"? Probably. But they also probably envisioned some other uses that were of undisputed benefit to society.

As someone else said, MIT is still behind Tor. Grep the source for the Tor client for IP numbers. You will find that some belong to MIT. My understanding is that Tor is controlled by a small group (maybe only one person) because like anything else that uses a network, there has to be a bootstrap, a "root" that hands out the initial addresses. And anyone that uses the Tor trusts that root. Somewhere there is/are a few people with a great responsibility on their hands: they make Tor possible, for better, or worse.

More people need to use Tor for non-criminal purposes. Using Tor as a workaround for censorship, whether it is on HN, or in some oppressed country is to be expected. If you are the censor, and you don't like it, ban Tor. It is not difficult. HN does not ban Tor.

One of the great myths on the 'net is that an IP address equates to a machine or a customer account. False. It represents an interface, which is itself an ephemeral concept. Interfaces can be created, cloned or destroyed at the blink of an eye.

This may all be frightening or it may be exciting, it all depends on how you look at it. It shouldn't matter whether you are a good samaritan or a criminal. It is just technology. Abstract tools. A hammer can be used to build something or it can be used to destroy something. It has no moral sensibility on its own.

That's up to you, the user.

As a Tor user (I can't post to HN without it), it bothers me that others are using it for criminal purposes. But when I look at hammer, I see a tool for creation, not destruction. I think like a carpenter. What can we build?

The hammer has no consciousness of its own, any more than Tor does.