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Is Tor still safe to use?

blog.torproject.org

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Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#441

Post by pc86 »

berkes wrote: post #434
perlgeek wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most governments value their law enforcement obligations and/or desire for surveillance more strongly than an Internet that is protected from spying, so good luck with that.

Ironically, most of these same sectors in the same governments have strong need to be protected from spying themselves. So in many cases it's really a case of "we want a monopoly on secrecy". Which should be a massive red flag for everyone, from left to right, from liberal to conservative, from anarchist to communist and so on. But somehow isn't picked up by any of these. I presume because they all believe somehow th…

Several of those ideologies you mention are just different flavors of authoritarianism, and one of an ideological authoritarian's primary goals is power. Hell, take out "anarchist" and you could make a convincing argument they're all authoritarians in their own way. You don't get power by giving the populace - or helping them to keep - a free, secure Internet. It's just completely antithetical to someone who wants to hold power by nondemocratic means.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#442

Post by ranger_danger »

belorn wrote: post #264
bragr wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This could cost less than $5000 for a month I ran a bunch of nodes for a couple years and that's optimistic by perhaps an order of magnitude. No $5 a month VPS provides enough bandwidth to sustain the monthly traffic of a Tor node, and nodes need to be continuously online and serving traffic for about 2-3 months[1] before they will be promoted to guard relays. Throttling traffic to stay in your bandwidth allocation…

Now to add additional problems. 1000 tor nodes on a single platform would be very noticeable and geographically limited. Platforms also have different weight attached to them in the consensus, which adds further time requirements before a node is promoted. The developers do not want a single platform provider to be able to observe a large portion of all the traffic, so there are counter measures. The attacker could t…

Considering multiple world governments have already shown in leaked documents that this is exactly what they do, I personally wouldn't trust my secrets with tor.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#443

Post by ranger_danger »

INTPenis wrote: post #413
arktos_ wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance, but I thought it fruitful to ask: Are there any issues that can arise by doing this on a VPS? I ask because I know of stories of law enforcement sending inquiries to owners of, say, exit nodes requiring certain information about given traffic. I don't know if this happens for middle-nodes (or whatever they're called). Moreover, are there any issues with associating a node to, you know, your name…

I ran tor exit nodes on Linode and Digitalocean for years. No real issues, but you will get regular abuse complaints. The support teams always understood once I explained it was a tor exit node. I co-operated with the Cloud provider and added any IP-address that requested it to my list of exempt addresses.

> The support teams always understood

But they don't have to. It could also be against their ToS, and many other providers would not have been ok with it. Accounts and domains have been taken away for much less.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#444

Post by pc86 »

valianteffort wrote: post #24

Federal agencies operate enough exit nodes to make Tor use risky at best. I have no idea if they have since implemented some feature to prevent this but if not I would stay far away from Tor if you're planning to do illegal things. There's also the risk of trusting service operators to secure any PII you expose on marketplaces. Not that I think the Fed's would blow their cover to hunt down people buying drugs but sti…

This brings up a couple questions I've always had about Tor. I played around with it a bit maybe a decade ago and it seemed it was used for drugs, CSAM, and getting yourself honeypotted trying to buy illegal guns or murder-for-hire.

I always assumed if you were doing things where your threat model included governments trying to kill you that Tor wouldn't be all that useful even if it was secure.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#445

Post by Workaccount2 »

maxrecursion wrote: post #440
WHA8m wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a quick note on the Youtube channel you mention: I follow his videos for a while and it seems to me, that he's half a shill. My impression is, that he re-models popular HN threads into Youtube videos. Just watch the latest video on the MrBeast topic and you'll basically get the same info as all the popular 'root' comments (was on HN front page last week). Not the first time I noticed a suspicious connection.

While that is a crappy thing to do, I bet tons of YouTubers are doing just that. Hell, most political YouTubers just read articles and make stupid comments about them. It would be impossible to create daily content if you weren't just rehashing, or taking, information from somewhere. Again, not defending it at all, just saying it's probably a very common thing. Like how some crappy news articles are just a bunch of r…

If you ever fall into "hustler-get-rich-quick" shorts/reels/tik-toks, it is full of people laying out the same exact scheme:

Make a channel

Find popular reddit/social media post

Use AI tools for text to speech

Use AI tools to generate pictures

Stitch it all together

Post on channel.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#446

Post by toby- »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #433
toby- wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So was the Internet at DARPA (or its modern foundation). And the WWW at CERN. Tor's development team aren't on the payroll of the US gov't, and their funding comes from many sources. If having received funding from a government agency is enough to earn your distrust, you'd quickly become a paranoid schizophrenic.

> Tor's development team aren't on the payroll of the US gov't, and their funding comes from many sources. That's not serious. From the Tor official blog: > U.S. Government (53.5% of total revenue) > Individual Donations (28.5% of total revenue) > Non-U.S. Governments (7.5% of total revenue) > Foundations (6.4% of total revenue) > Corporations (3.4% of total revenue) > Other (0.6% of total revenue) https://blog.torpr…

It's true that a majority is from the US government through various funding schemes and grants. They're very transparent about their funding and ongoing efforts to diversify. But a little over half coming from US government sources isn't the same as their devs literally being on the gov't payroll; people often talk about Tor as if the developers themselves earn a government salary.

(Funnily, Signal also received major funding from US government sources but very few people seem to question that when lauding Signal.)

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#447

Post by pc86 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #137

I am interested in the “legitimate” uses for tor. I have not kept up with this but I understand it was designed by US Navy to make it hard for oppressive regiemes to track their citizens use of web. What do we want Tor for except as a hope that Russian citizens might be able to get to the BBC site? I am asking honestly - and would prefer not to be told my own government is on the verge of a mass pogrum so we had bett…

Let's not discount the validity of making it easier for Russians, or Chinese, or North Koreans, to get western media.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#448

Post by pc86 »

fragmede wrote: post #155
knodi123 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason we have SSL on this site, despite the fact that it has no sex, no storefront, nor any access to my banking or private information. If everything is SSL secured, then we don't have to explain why any specific thing is SSL secured. The same reason can be applied to use of TOR.

The point ranking on comments, which is private, would be of interest to parties training an LLM and want the data annotated, but your point stands.

"Every site having SSL is a Good Thing because it means you don't need to defend your use of SSL. If more people used Tor it would mean you didn't need to defend your use of Tor."

"Yeah but Y Combinator made a decision that makes it harder for me to auto-generate spam."

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#449

Post by flufluflufluffy »

As knowledgeable users of the Internet in 2024, we would do well to assume that nothing is 100% “safe” (I.e. there’s no such thing as perfect security/privacy).

However, some things, like Tor, can make your use of the Internet safer.

If all you’re doing is arguing that Tor shouldn’t be used because it isn’t/was never “safe”, then you might as well not use the Internet at all.

Re: Is Tor still safe to use?

#450

Post by toby- »

notepad0x90 wrote: post #426
toby- wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't you trust Tor? Do you mean you wouldn't trust it at all, or wouldn't trust it completely?

I mean at all, but I don't have any reasons worth mentioning here, that I'm willing to defend on a public site.

Fair enough. Was just curious. :)
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