Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
1–10 of 29 posts
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#2The article mentions "hundreds of millions of new users". That would be great news for privacy on The Internet.
But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times.
Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going to pay for 100x or 1000x server capacity?
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#3Bravo. I would imagine this would be as an alternate and not in the default mainline. Whomever takes this step first will probably find it being used as a catalyst for much more than just anonymity. First users whom hit copyright walls on youtube and other sites have a quick route around: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." -- John Gilmore. But beyond this the services that could be built on mostly hidden end points are immense. Personal mail servers, instant access to files at home, selective public vs private sharing groups, etc.
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#4The article mentions "hundreds of millions of new users". That would be great news for privacy on The Internet. But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times. Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going…
While I agree with you I think there are two factors here (1) only a small fraction of the hundreds of millions would actually try out a Tor-private-browsing-mode and (2) tor won't grow until it is further strained (yes I know it is strained now). This would be great and would push innovation to solve the traffic problems.
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#5It would be so great if Mozilla integrated Tor. Beyond the curse of success mentioned in the article, it would really lower the burden on the Tor developers, who have had to support a lot of patches from Firefox that Mozilla have been slow to merge.
My main concern is that this will be hidden behind an option or an "extreme private" mode -- Tor seems too high-latency for the typical use-case of private browsing (image viewing and video streaming).
If you run a web service and would like to provide high-security anonymous access, consider running an Exit Enclave -- a Tor exit configured to exit only to your site. If Tor detects that your exit and your site share an IP address, it will automatically extend the normally 3-hop circuit to your node, and the traffic will exit the Tor network on your machine rather than an arbitrary node (which could be malicious).
I hope this finally kills the "only criminals use Tor" narrative the NSA and periodically, the media push. Everyone deserves strong anonymity.
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#6The article mentions "hundreds of millions of new users". That would be great news for privacy on The Internet. But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times. Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going…
See the part of the article starting: "There are several key challenges that Tor’s developers face when it comes to growing network capacity."
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#7The article mentions "hundreds of millions of new users". That would be great news for privacy on The Internet. But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times. Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going…
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Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#8The article mentions "hundreds of millions of new users". That would be great news for privacy on The Internet. But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times. Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going…
If the added use case bring too much strain on the network and cannot be solved through interest and need than Tor could simply split it off or itself into an alternate network.
I wish someone would integrate crypto currencies into the layers of the Tor onion. I could imagine paying a few cents for each unlayering. Basically you just include a private key for a wallet holding 0.0000n cents in each layer with perhaps 0.000n for the exit. But I guess this will take some time for intuition to adapt to it.
I would assume that the organisation supposedly integrating Tor would have to fund tor exit and bridge nodes in mass. Or just force users using this alternate private mode to also share bandwidth in a p2p/skype like manner.
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#9The article mentions "hundreds of millions of new users". That would be great news for privacy on The Internet. But it would surely slow the Tor network to a halt. Users trying out privacy-enhancing technology would be disappointed guaranteed with 30+ seconds page load times. Tor has roughly 1000 exit nodes, all traffic flows through them. It needs to have much more capacity to handle that kind of load. Who is going…
That is precisely the topic of the article. For a more in-depth view, you can read this tor-talk mailing list thread: http://archives.seul.org/or/dev/Sep-2014/msg00091.html
(This is the original source for the Dot article.)
A summary: Raw bandwidth isn't the limiting factor in scaling Tor; before you just plug in traffic to the network, you'd need to optimize Tor's internal protocols to make expansion of the network even possible. However, those hurdles are fairly small, and once they're handled, it's just a matter of funding to pump up more nodes, which is much more simple.
Further, not all Firefox users (if the article's speculation is correct) will be using private browsing at once. So the actual increase is probably 5-10% (at most? anyone know actual statistics about private browsing?) of that number.
Re: Tor executive director hints at Firefox integration
#10It would be so great if Mozilla integrated Tor. Beyond the curse of success mentioned in the article, it would really lower the burden on the Tor developers, who have had to support a lot of patches from Firefox that Mozilla have been slow to merge. My main concern is that this will be hidden behind an option or an "extreme private" mode -- Tor seems too high-latency for the typical use-case of private browsing (imag…
> My main concern is that this will be hidden behind an option or an "extreme private" mode
To add to your point, effectively using Tor means disabling JavaScript.