81–90 of 104 posts
I'm not a fan of this. Any chance Mullvad would offer a service plan where the money I'm paying them does NOT go to the support of Tor?
Why would you bother whom Mullvad pays if you get your dollars worth of service ?
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Given that they have literally switched their nodes to be diskless and released lots of their work to strongly disable logging in systems, that may be acceptable for most users. The risk model determines your behavior.
Given that they have SAID they are diskless, etc. I feel like there is no scenario where it should be allowed to forget that all the claims are always falsifiable. Not saying they are lying, just that no one ever truly knows. It's important to not be complacent with that.
https://www.assured.se/publications/Assured_Mullvad_relay_se...
I'm not a fan of this. Any chance Mullvad would offer a service plan where the money I'm paying them does NOT go to the support of Tor?
> Those that understand privacy, actively work to improve anti-fingerprinting and to protect users against more advanced attacks - are even fewer. > We believe that the Tor Project is one such organisation. We share their values when it comes to human rights, freedom of expression, anti-censorship and online privacy. The Tor Project is primarily funded by the State Department and DARPA. Make of that as you will.
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...besides the US Government, TOR's largest benefactor by far. In case anyone needed reminding. https://www.torproject.org/static/findoc/2020-TorProject-For...
I can totally imagine they're using Tor for some undercover (foreign) operations or similar. I don't think the US Government with all its branches is known to practise exactly what it preaches.
The US government has different parts with different goals: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/10/05... (paywalled). IIRC, the NSA has interests in conducting surveillance, and the State Department has interests in allowing liberal foreign dissidents to defeat surveillance.
> Those that understand privacy, actively work to improve anti-fingerprinting and to protect users against more advanced attacks - are even fewer. > We believe that the Tor Project is one such organisation. We share their values when it comes to human rights, freedom of expression, anti-censorship and online privacy. The Tor Project is primarily funded by the State Department and DARPA. Make of that as you will.
This is brought up sometimes as some clever gotcha but Tor gets funding from many sources, and DARPA and the other US agencies that give money to Tor (like OTF) give on the order of 10s of thousands of US dollars per year. OTF (Open Technology Fund) — recently severely diminished — was funding tons of anti-censorship efforts like this with small grants to help get American propaganda into Iran, China, etc. Helping sp…
Painting the US government with a broad brush as "absolute evil" is just as bad as painting it with a broad brush of "savior of the world." Neither allows us to actually improve our government because in the former you can't encourage good actions and the latter doesn't allow you to discourage bad actions. If everything is bad then there are no degrees of bad. If everything is good there's no degrees of good. If Democracy is an optimization problem (it is) then this is like trying to find the optima by going in a constant direction with a constant step size.
I thought it was rather obvious that "shit is complicated and requires nuance" but I'm often impressed how common it is to pretend things are simple and obvious.
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This is brought up sometimes as some clever gotcha but Tor gets funding from many sources, and DARPA and the other US agencies that give money to Tor (like OTF) give on the order of 10s of thousands of US dollars per year. OTF (Open Technology Fund) — recently severely diminished — was funding tons of anti-censorship efforts like this with small grants to help get American propaganda into Iran, China, etc. Helping sp…
Their tax documents unambiguously state that the US government is their primary funder. At any rate, the USG has enormous leverage over the governance of Tor and that should worry anyone that pretends to care about their online privacy re: Tor. Mullvad putting out PR about funding TP as a peer of the USG doesn't make TP look good, it makes Mullvad look seedy.
No one is objecting to this fact. We're all objecting to your conclusion that because the US Gov gives Tor money that it is not secure and/or has a nefarious purpose. This is quite literally the same logic people use to justify the anti-vaccination movement and many other dangerous conspiracies. You don't have to trust the US Gov (what American does?), but you need more than association to prove something nefarious.
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The most obvious example: whistleblowing.
Fair enough, but I have no idea how that would require me to always use TOR, lest the insanely unlikely scenario arise that I need to expose some hidden information. Also wait, whistleblowing on the government? I’m not privy to anything like that.
Suddenly starting to join the Tor network often around the time some major information is leaked would be a strong correlator pointing to your guilt. I'm just using one example, but there are many scenarios where this matters.
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I don't think so? For example signal's decision to leave the UK if they mandate a back door was very well received here.
The dichotomy indicates that isn't the fundamental principle driving it.
Or that people have objections to it on completely different grounds, not on anonymity/privacy grounds.
Plus, what yjftsjthsd-h said.
There are many reasons why what you perceive as an inconsistency may not, in fact, be.
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The dichotomy indicates that isn't the fundamental principle driving it.
Or, possibly, that some people don't agree that cryptocurrency shares the same fundamental principle. Cryptocurrency isn't actually that anonymous and certainly isn't private, after all. Or that people have objections to it on completely different grounds, not on anonymity/privacy grounds. Plus, what yjftsjthsd-h said. There are many reasons why what you perceive as an inconsistency may not, in fact, be.
But the assertion wasn't that crypto is private, it's that the crypto threads evoke anti-privacy viewpoints like the need for KYC. KYC is inherently anti-private, it's a warrantless compelled search by the government of your papers for identity. My perception at least is different attitudes on average on those threads, like people are more accepting that privacy needs to be invaded to prevent criminals.