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by colemickens 2544 days ago
Why is this downvoted? It took less than 30 seconds to fire up Orbot, connect, open YouTube and start streaming a video without any issue or fuss.

Sometimes when people talk about Tor, it reminds me of how people talked about Linux up until a couple years ago - often touting very out-dated impressions as if they were current observations. Tor bandwidth is very different than it was 5-10 years ago.
2 comments
viraptor 2544 days ago
It's not very consistent. Sometimes you get a gateway which is great, sometimes one which is limited to 10kbps, sometimes one running some monitoring experiments which doesn't care if you get any bandwidth (I was running one for a while).
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colemickens 2543 days ago
My understanding is that bad/poor gateways are penalized. In my own experience, I've only ever needed to change circuits manually once (but I'm primarily using Tor to NAT punch to hidden services, not sure if that matters ).
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bauerd 2544 days ago
Didn't downvote, still >30 seconds for getting a video playing isn't super convincing. That's far too slow for everyday use, at least for me
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colemickens 2543 days ago
While I said less than 30 seconds, it really was about 10 seconds but I didn't want to sound like I was exaggerating. And that was of course including switching apps, the initial Tor connection, switching apps back, waiting for my feed to load, clicking a video.

I just tried again, it took 6 seconds to open Orbot and completely connect to Tor. The rest was business as usual. Maybe a 1, 1.5 second delay getting to YouTube and for the video to start playback. For what Tor offers, that is impressive, and I don't know what could possibly be convincing beyond that point. Not to mention that one can just leave Orbot running as well. And since I'm on Android, I can opt to have specific app traffic sent through Tor, or Orbot can act as a system-wide VPN.

I'd make a video showing how painless it is, but setting it up, recording and uploading would take a hundredfold more time than just trying it out.

edit: I know that it's purely anecdotal, but I just enabled Orbot VPN mode and fired up "Speedtest". It is reporting 7Mbps and 3.65Mbps up. It's not great, but to me that is usable if your privacy needs outweigh need for speed. And a screenshot if it's of interest, you can see that it's in VPN mode and Orbot is running: https://i.imgur.com/UZu4aJs.png

edit2: yikes, I actually just backed up 29 full-resolution screenshots to my Google Photos account without even realizing Orbot was still connected. Convinces me!

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