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Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

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41–50 of 72 posts

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#41
post #4

I keep copies of these papers in a safe in case I never need to re-develop the Internet from scratch. No seriously, the Tor papers are amazing and even hint at the means by which Tor might be manipulated to, say, track down someone like Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving a double life sentence, plus forty years, without the possibility of parole.

I myself have read this particular paper a few times, and plan to put a fresh printed copy in a cover protector. Something about keeping this thing for years strikes a chord with me

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#42
post #31

Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running of relays and exit nodes through microtransactions without compromising privacy. Would be great if we could make Tor fast enough that it could actually be used as a substitute for commercial VPNs.

That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid:

https://www.orchid.com/

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you take them down how you can; in a similar light how Capone was taken down on taxes and not murder, corruption, smuggling, or conspiracy. Or are all purveyors of the 'free market' automatically heroes in your eyes?

> Or are all purveyors of the 'free market' automatically heroes in your eyes? No, I don't even like the guy. Why must I consider someone a hero to feel they deserve a trial for their punished actions?

A trial did occur for Ross Ulbricht; I don't understand your point.

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#45
post #31

Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running of relays and exit nodes through microtransactions without compromising privacy. Would be great if we could make Tor fast enough that it could actually be used as a substitute for commercial VPNs.

That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid: https://www.orchid.com/

Is there more info about active development? That site doesn't say much. I found some GitHub repos that were last updated in the summer[0]. It's going to be unfortunate if they stay with AGPL.

0 - https://github.com/orchidsource

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#46

There is also I2P which is just like Tor but unlike it is designed to withstand the traffic from bittorrent clients (useful for people living in dorms on in America) and can also tunnel UDP (unlike Tor which can only tunnel TCP). That being said, I really like the new onion-v3 protocol that Tor added as it moves from the outdated 1024-bit rsa + sha1 addresses with 1024-bit DH and AES-128 to the state-of-the-art ed255…

I think it's an important distinction that one has identified developers, and one has anonymous developers.

It doesn't seem clear to me that one is generally better than another, I think they complement each other.

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#47
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road, who is currently serving For running a free market. It's fucked up.

I believe that he was sentenced for money-laundering, hacking, and conspiracy to traffic narcotics. You do yourself no service to memoize this as "running a free market."

> conspiracy to traffic narcotics

I don't recognize this as a legitimate offense to law in a free society. I see it as, yes, "running a free market". That the state chooses to serve its interests by finding differently is unsurprising. But why do you?

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company could have a lot of problems if one of their employees decided to host a node in their network, so quite literally yeah

What kind of problems company could have?

I ran an exit node at home for a couple months. Within minutes of my dynamic IP being updated from my ISP, cloudflare could figure out that I was an exit node, and then would fail to differentiate my own, non tor traffic, with that of the traffic exiting my node. The result being every single cloudflare backed website will hit you with a captcha on every page you view.

My ISP would also randomly shut off my connection with some vague email about having compromised computer on my network i needed to fix. I'd have to call and make up some story to get them to turn my internet back on.

Essentially all kinds of people associate TOR with unsavory activity and as such put hoops to jump through when accessing stuff through tor. When you host an exit node your non tor traffic is considered to be outbound TOR traffic based on the IP the traffic originates from.

I cant imagine what would happen if I ran a node on the same network as our email server. I have to assume that we'd get blacklisted for spam quick if our mx resolved to a tor exit node IP.

Then there's the whole issue of more or less being guaranteed to be complicit in the distribution of CP. With really only safe harbor laws protecting you.

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#49
post #5
post #2

It mentions mixmaster and mixminion, but those projects seem to have died. I feel like they are needed more than ever.

Indeed. I've often thought that such high-latency mix-nets (with their potentially superior resistance to traffic analysis) would be a nice complement to low-latency networks like Tor.

I2P provides cover traffic. I believe GNUnet can also be configured to use a certain amount of cover traffic.

Re: Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router (2004)

#50

I love Tor and use it often (also collaborated with code and nodes). But the problem lately is that all sites are banning it. Even HN, gives you trouble when connecting through Tor.

Tor is often a vector for abuse, so tor node IPs get banned. I'd like to see a way to have nodes block certain origins without being able to identify them.
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