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Partnering with Mozilla

blog.torproject.org

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Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#61

Post by tempestn »

01Michael10 wrote: post #45
jMyles wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and guns to defend.

Guns are NOT defensive weapons... You could be standing in the Starbucks line with any weapon of your choosing and I can just walk up to you and pull out a pistol and splatter your brains across the counter. No problem... EDIT - Why is my off-topic comment with an argument being down-voted in a reply to a off-topic statement with no argument is not? There must be a lot of gun lovers on Hacker News...

I believe in restrictive gun laws; sometimes people have psychotic breaks for instance, and it's preferable there not be a gun handy when they do. That said, guns absolutely can be used to defend. The most obvious example is that police officers carry guns to defend the general public from criminals (who may also have guns). Yes, you could say the act of firing a gun is offensive, but the threat of the weapon can still be used defensively, and even shooting someone could be considered defensive if it is done to save the lives of others.

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#62

Post by tete »

synchronise wrote: post #35
kijin wrote: post #4

More relays? That's great, but why not exit nodes? Mozilla certainly has the manpower and infrastructure to operate a bunch of exit nodes, and if they have any legal qualms about it, hey, they just partnered with an EFF project, right?

What I don't understand is why Tor doesn't bundle their relays with their clients and have a network that scales better naturally, like I2P, and instead relies on people hosting their own, hopefully high bandwidth, relays.

There are two reasons I see. Trouble in some jurisdictions. But then there is also people who want to secretly use Tor (using Bridges). If for example Chinese (or Iranian or whoever) want to secretly use Tor, which is possible with bridges then it wouldn't be good if they were in a public list.

One more reason maybe is that you also want to have Tor running as a weak client, like on your smartphone. On such devices and in such networks running a relay would probably cause issues, both for you, but also for clients.

You can't really compare it with Bittorrent, cause what mostly mentions in File Sharing is throughput, whereas Tor also requires low latency for example.

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#64

Post by nhaehnle »

annnnd wrote: post #60
bigiain wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I _intentionally_ de-anonymize myself over TOR as often as I remember to. I make a point of browsing things like local council and government websites using TOR, including logging in or providing details in contact forms, while doing mundane and ordinary stuff like booking extra garbage collections.

Interesting - care to elaborate on the reasons?

I'm not bigiain, but an obvious motivation would be that the more people use Tor for obviously mundane reasons, the more plausible deniability exists for all Tor users. After all, the fact that you're using Tor cannot be hidden, and you don't want people to fall under suspicion merely for being Tor users. In other words, there is probably no direct benefit to bigiain for doing this, but she/he is doing everybody a service.

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#65

Post by nhaehnle »

synchronise wrote: post #35
kijin wrote: post #4

More relays? That's great, but why not exit nodes? Mozilla certainly has the manpower and infrastructure to operate a bunch of exit nodes, and if they have any legal qualms about it, hey, they just partnered with an EFF project, right?

What I don't understand is why Tor doesn't bundle their relays with their clients and have a network that scales better naturally, like I2P, and instead relies on people hosting their own, hopefully high bandwidth, relays.

Tor has the goal of being high bandwidth and low latency, and relays on home connections can be problematic. Many home connections have rather low upstream bandwidth, for example, so that circuits through such relays would be limited to few KB/s.

The idea of having everybody be a relay is definitely tempting, but there are genuine engineering problems with it.

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#66

Post by p4bl0 »

nhaehnle wrote: post #64
annnnd wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting - care to elaborate on the reasons?

I'm not bigiain, but an obvious motivation would be that the more people use Tor for obviously mundane reasons, the more plausible deniability exists for all Tor users. After all, the fact that you're using Tor cannot be hidden, and you don't want people to fall under suspicion merely for being Tor users. In other words, there is probably no direct benefit to bigiain for doing this, but she/he is doing everybody a se…

Exactly this. Since Facebook has a .onion, I sometimes use instead of the .com, and even if I don't use my real name on Facebook, I'm not at all anonymous there.

I also have my personal web page accessible as a Tor Hidden Service [1] and as an EepSite [2], even if a personal web page is the least anonymous thing you can think of.

[1] http://pablo6zbxiijn5hd.onion/

[2] http://p4bl0.i2p/

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#67

Post by UweSchmidt »

GigabyteCoin wrote: post #49
mccr8 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As hackuser says elsewhere, Tor is not really a fire-and-forget security solution. My understanding is that in order to use it without compromising yourself you need to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of its limitations.

That could easily change with the help of a well funded team like Mozilla.

A lot of internet usage is logging in to Email, FB. If you do that an attacker knows that this particular user is you. Not sure how that can be "fixed" easily.

To recap the current situation: You need to run a normal browser (for convenience) for facebooking (of course running NoScript, Ghostery, RequestPolicy etc.) and the Tor browser for researching things you don't want to be associated with your identity (yet nothing that law enforcement or intelligence agencies care about).

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#68

Post by jMyles »

01Michael10 wrote: post #45
jMyles wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and guns to defend.

Guns are NOT defensive weapons... You could be standing in the Starbucks line with any weapon of your choosing and I can just walk up to you and pull out a pistol and splatter your brains across the counter. No problem... EDIT - Why is my off-topic comment with an argument being down-voted in a reply to a off-topic statement with no argument is not? There must be a lot of gun lovers on Hacker News...

You are being downvoted because people disagree. I'm not sure how I feel about the downvote button being used this way, but I also disagree with you. I wish that instead of downvoting, people will just explain their positions.

For my part:

Personally owned firearms are used for defense far more often than for aggression. The easiest scenario to picture is the one in which a sidearm is merely revealed (rather than brandished or fired) in order to deter an attacker.

The vast majority of successful uses of guns for personal protection do not involve discharge. I think it's reasonable to call these purely "defensive" uses.

I agree that, on its face, discharging a firearm with the intent to kill or injure another person is offensive. However, this is an over-simplification of the (largely positive, in my experience) role that firearms play in our society.

A sufficient distribution of concealed carry permits creates (or at least can create) a sort of herd immunity against certain types of violent crime.

Volunteer open carry provides an example of how protective force might be delegated in a community without the need for a police force.

A culture of firearms safety and training, along with widespread ownership of effective tactical arms, can cause an entity, even a state actor, to opt against brute-force repression of a community.

If you want a crash course in firearm culture amidst unending dedication to peace and compassion, check out Porcupine Festival. (And for what it's worth, there are also very intense tech talks and hacking sessions that will blow your mind).

Re: Partnering with Mozilla

#69

Post by pcthrowaway »

stingraycharles wrote: post #55
higherpurpose wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's what could help - turning all users into (exit) relays. That strategy has worked for torrents very well - all downloaders are also seeders (I think it's a similar situation). This solves multiple things: 1) makes it much harder to do traffic analysis 2) makes it almost impossible to "go after relays". Sure, they'll still try to arrest some here and there, just like they try to arrest people who torrent movies,…

The problem is that you do not make the distinction between a regular relay and an exit node. There are enough regular relays in the tor network, but people hesitate running exit nodes because of the legal liabilities: many ISPs do not want you to run a tor exit node, because of the nature of some traffic coming through the tor network (illegal marketplaces, child porn, etc -- as you can read in the article, even Moz…

I agree that it's too crazy for Mozilla to seriously consider it.

But, assuming Tor did receive widespread adoption of exit nodes at this scale, the internet would have to adapt to accommodate this many people rerouting other people's traffic. ISPs would encounter the same backlash for throttling or blocking users who run exit nodes as they currently face when doing it to users running Netflix.

Unfortunately, it takes mass adoption to force this kind of adaptation, and it's generally an easier fight to maintain venues of freedom than to open new ones. So we have a chicken and egg problem essentially; Mass adoption is necessary to force regulatory and infrastructural accommodation, and that accommodation is necessary to foster mass adoption.

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