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We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

blog.torproject.org

1–10 of 67 posts

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#3
Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is open and the number of users/nodes would skyrocket. Imagine the ever Tor tab potentially being an exit node!

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#5
post #3

Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…

For many people, half a megabit is more than their Internet uplink speed, and many are on capped/metered connections as well.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#6
post #3

Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…

For many people, half a megabit is more than their Internet uplink speed, and many are on capped/metered connections as well.

I haven't checked, but I imagine there's a "Metered connection mode" that limits things like auto-updates and perhaps loads lower resolution images. That could also disable bandwidth donation. You could also set the bandwidth to scale based on a speed test instead of a flat rate.

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#7
post #3

Can you imagine if Mozilla went with the nuclear option and replaced "private" tabs with Tor tabs? Going further, what if every Tor tab (by default, letting you opt out) acted as a node on the network and donated some minuscule bandwidth? I can see some tech heads being against such a thing, but your average user would have no idea 0.5Mb/sec (or some % of a speed tested value) is being used while their private tab is…

[deleted]

Re: We Can Choose an Internet Without Surveillance

#9
post #4

The Tor browser helps with websites, but with a "privacy router" you can make sure connections from apps and the OS are routed as well. E.g. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/glinet/mudi-4g-lte-priv...

I was excited about this concept a few years ago and talked it over with the Tor developers. Their concern is that the Tor Browser has an elaborate ongoing effort to prevent tracking by removing unique identifiers and isolating session state. A regular browser used through Tor would be extremely trackable because it wouldn't hide or isolate any of these things, and indeed you could associate Tor activity with non-Tor activity easily.

Other software doesn't normally take these precautions, and so you would often end up leaking a ton of identifying information when applications that didn't expect it were proxied by Tor.

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