Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

cnet.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 71 posts

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#31

Post by talldayo »

whatwhaaaaat wrote: post #18
Spooky23 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only have to mess up once. Google has programs where they can identify budding extremists and correlate behavior to medical diagnoses without HIPAA exposure. If your secret weird shit that you’re doing with Tor is of interest, they’ll eventually get a profile. Using Tor is like setting off the bat signal.

what is this program called? The fact that we tolerate this shit is unbelievable.

> The fact that we tolerate this shit is unbelievable.

The fact that we tolerate it is relatively expected; the fact that Snowden leaked 90% of this stuff a decade ago and nobody cares is what's unbelievable. We kinda deserve to be surveilled if this kind of apathy is what dominates our behavior and executive function.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#32

Post by Intermernet »

wslh wrote: post #25
Intermernet wrote: post #21

Imagine the world without internet ads. Journalism wouldn't be a click bait race to the bottom, news would still be relatively unbiased, and the nsa would have one less massive vector to track you with. I'm honestly just waiting for people to realise that online ads are the root cause of most of the things people complain about. Fake news? Check Surveillance state? Check Screen addiction? Check Lack of nuance in any…

But ads are an inevitable effect, no matter if they are online or "offline", except if you think that ads should be prohibited which would turn to a different discussion.

Oh, we're in that discussion. I have yet to see a valid argument for advertising of any sort that outweighs the negatives that the industry currently displays.

We're well beyond the arguments for the recommendation graphs and the open market. Adtech, as it's currently practiced, is basically rage farming in disguise.

Gotta maximise that emotional quotient.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#33

Post by hansvm »

Intermernet wrote: post #21

Imagine the world without internet ads. Journalism wouldn't be a click bait race to the bottom, news would still be relatively unbiased, and the nsa would have one less massive vector to track you with. I'm honestly just waiting for people to realise that online ads are the root cause of most of the things people complain about. Fake news? Check Surveillance state? Check Screen addiction? Check Lack of nuance in any…

You can even imagine an alternate reality where the central ad serving entity emerged as pull-based instead of push-based.

Ads can, in theory, serve a useful purpose, informing individuals of products and services which would legitimately make their lives better (e.g., I bought a low-end immersion blender a year or two ago, didn't know they existed too far beforehand, and am quite happy with the ease/safety improvements over any other blending strategy I used to have, especially for bulk and/or hot liquids, especially compared to what I paid and how much space it takes, but without _some_ kind of ad I might never have known about the product (not a perfect example, since I learned about them from a friend, but hypothetically)).

The push-based ad ecosystem has a tacit assumption that people don't want the products and services being sold. That's a mostly true assumption, but instead of the solution being filtering to better products, well-vetted products, avoiding added-cost-without-added-benefit lookalike products, not advertising outright frauds, ..., the industry has opted for more invasive ways of forcing us to watch things we won't ever care about and siphoning invasive tax/healthcare/... information to slightly reduce the miss-rate in ad serving.

That's probably inevitable without regulation (it's cheaper to bully people into watching ads than to improve your ad inventory, with the side benefit that as an ad network you profit when suckers fall for the frauds too, plus it's easier to charge the company making money instead of the end consumer, so a profit-focused company will naturally swim that direction). As an alternative business model though, imagine great search tools on top of a pool of better ad inventory, where you could choose the demographic info and interests you wanted to be considered for a particular search session instead of having that inferred from your browsing history and the raw copies of your paystubs your employer is likely selling.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#34

Post by DoctorOetker »

fortran77 wrote: post #2

I'm not understanding this. If I use the "Tor Browser Bundle" and never use that browser for anything but Tor, and never log in to anything on that browser, how can they track me?

Tor is not resilient against timing correlation attacks.

Suppose Alfred hosts a Tor onion describing relativistic physics.

Suppose Bob cautiously uses Tor to consult such information on a regular basis.

Then depending on priviliged access or leverage on the internet backbone multiple approaches can be used:

A) suppose some regions randomly suffer internet or power black-outs. Obviously a Tor onion interacting with the Tor network is not in that region. While a Tor onion disconnected for the duration of such an event is possibly/probably in one of such regions. Similar for tor Browsers.

B) instead of waiting for spontaneous events they can be elicited (costly in case of internet blackouts, very costly in case of energy blackouts).

C) instead of disabling participation, one can randomly stall it: if ISP's at both ends co-operate or are compromised, network packets can be intentionally given known pseudorandom delays on top of the spontaneous delays. By calculating the correlation of the delays one can identify which Tor user IP address is frequenting which Tor onion host IP address. This works even if the added delays are smaller than the spontaneous delays, because the spontaneous delays are uncorrelated with the injected delays so the "correlation" of the spontaneous delays with the injected delays will average towards 0, whereas the correlation factor of injected delays will correlate with the injected delays. The number of packets necessary to have true positives raise above the noise floor depends on the relative sizes of the spontaneous variation in delays and the injected delays. If the injection delays are smaller it will take many more packets before true positives rise above the noise floor.

This article is from the time of the Snowden leaks, more than 10 years ago.

The moment they have correlated the traffic on your ISP's end, with the traffic on the specific Tor onion's ISP's end, they can just ask your ISP for your true name.

In this case the experts were convinced cookies were used, which is conceivably correct for a fraction of the users. The cookies and ads were probably multifunctionally abused: tracking random browsing, spam email for lucky hits, propagation delay injection of the advertisement packets, ...

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#35

Post by lyu07282 »

Intermernet wrote: post #21

Imagine the world without internet ads. Journalism wouldn't be a click bait race to the bottom, news would still be relatively unbiased, and the nsa would have one less massive vector to track you with. I'm honestly just waiting for people to realise that online ads are the root cause of most of the things people complain about. Fake news? Check Surveillance state? Check Screen addiction? Check Lack of nuance in any…

The root cause? You've missed the giant elephant that's standing right there in the room. It's strange how the elephant managed to make itself invisible. I agree the elephant shit is really bad and really stinks, we should do something about the shit, but we should also do something about the elephant.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#36

Post by Intermernet »

hansvm wrote: post #33
Intermernet wrote: post #21

Imagine the world without internet ads. Journalism wouldn't be a click bait race to the bottom, news would still be relatively unbiased, and the nsa would have one less massive vector to track you with. I'm honestly just waiting for people to realise that online ads are the root cause of most of the things people complain about. Fake news? Check Surveillance state? Check Screen addiction? Check Lack of nuance in any…

You can even imagine an alternate reality where the central ad serving entity emerged as pull-based instead of push-based. Ads can, in theory, serve a useful purpose, informing individuals of products and services which would legitimately make their lives better (e.g., I bought a low-end immersion blender a year or two ago, didn't know they existed too far beforehand, and am quite happy with the ease/safety improveme…

I guarantee you would have learnt about that immersion blender without Adtech.

I'm not saying the industry can't be useful, I'm saying that it's broken.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#37

Post by samstave »

npteljes wrote: post #20
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Install a cookie autodelete extension. That will let you whitelist cookies you want for persistent logins and discard the rest. They can usually be configured to purge on tab closing.

Autodelete is old tech if you ask me. If you open the sites before the autodelete happens, then the tracking still happens. Temporary Containers is an addon that solves this elegantly.

This may be dumb:

Wouldnt an "AI-Container-as-A-Browser" be nifty:

Create a container that runs with an AI agent that does your browsing "for you" whereby it does the connection, cookie management, anonymously tor' wrapping as required/set/needed such that you have an abstraction between you and all your browsing, and the browser can dev/null the ads and never let them render and poison the reply with synthetic data crafting all packets that go back to the cookie providers?

I also want ti to auto crawl an delete PII from all ad / identity brokers / white-pages/scam-spam. a "Delete me from the internet" bot

I really really want this.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#38

Post by Intermernet »

lyu07282 wrote: post #35
Intermernet wrote: post #21

Imagine the world without internet ads. Journalism wouldn't be a click bait race to the bottom, news would still be relatively unbiased, and the nsa would have one less massive vector to track you with. I'm honestly just waiting for people to realise that online ads are the root cause of most of the things people complain about. Fake news? Check Surveillance state? Check Screen addiction? Check Lack of nuance in any…

The root cause? You've missed the giant elephant that's standing right there in the room. It's strange how the elephant managed to make itself invisible. I agree the elephant shit is really bad and really stinks, we should do something about the shit, but we should also do something about the elephant.

What's the elephant? I feel like we agree, but we're talking past each other.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#39

Post by talldayo »

Intermernet wrote: post #32
wslh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ads are an inevitable effect, no matter if they are online or "offline", except if you think that ads should be prohibited which would turn to a different discussion.

Oh, we're in that discussion. I have yet to see a valid argument for advertising of any sort that outweighs the negatives that the industry currently displays. We're well beyond the arguments for the recommendation graphs and the open market. Adtech, as it's currently practiced, is basically rage farming in disguise. Gotta maximise that emotional quotient.

> We're well beyond the arguments for the recommendation graphs and the open market.

Why? If people prefer these options, I don't see how forcing them into an alternative is any better. People on X could enjoy a free experience with no ads if they used Mastodon instead, but they actively seek out X. They want an ads-included package because they feel that the value is stronger than the alternatives.

I despise ads, but I don't think it's fair to characterize ads as market abuse any more than paid services are abusive. People consider the deal fair, they don't care about surveillance capitalism and they want to watch their YouTube video.

Re: NSA tracks Google ads to find Tor users

#40

Post by Intermernet »

tqi wrote: post #27
Intermernet wrote: post #21

Imagine the world without internet ads. Journalism wouldn't be a click bait race to the bottom, news would still be relatively unbiased, and the nsa would have one less massive vector to track you with. I'm honestly just waiting for people to realise that online ads are the root cause of most of the things people complain about. Fake news? Check Surveillance state? Check Screen addiction? Check Lack of nuance in any…

How would removing ads help with any of that stuff? Desire for power and influence are not byproducts of ads.

Ads literally dictate what you see online. They don't create the desire for power and influence, but they do create the structure for achieving power and influence.
Post reply on HN