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by dingdingdanggg 2436 days ago
Is an illegal* site online?

If I built this service I’d just log all the IPs from the requests and just hand them to the FBI.

9 comments

The BBC just announced the launch of their Tor site. Clearly Tor sites and illegal sites are not equivalent. Unless, perhaps, you live in China.
Why would you violate your users' privacy just because of the network they are using? Many activists use sites listed here, including ProtonMail, Keybase, DuckDuckGo.

If you're so happy to help USA law enforcement without a subpoena it's a very good thing you didn't build Facebook or Twitter.

Because the people who built Facebook or Twitter don’t do that, right? Let’s be serious.
I'm not trying to be a dick and you're obviously free to do what you wish (in case you wonder, I have not downvoted you). But this attitude has absolutely ruined the web. Despite all the improvements in web technologies, browsers and even bandwidth, I have noticeably more difficulty consuming good information today. This is 100% because of lax attitudes to user privacy.

Please stop. :)

A few months ago, I had someone tell me on the programming subreddit that, while they were very concerned about privacy and Google Chrome, they tried Firefox but went back to Chrome because (and I am not making this up) the font kerning in Firefox was slightly suboptimal in certain situations.

That's what we're fighting against. This was someone on a technical forum who understood the privacy issues at play. But they valued their own privacy so little that they were willing to trade it for slightly improved font kerning. In short, I worry that we're well and truly fucked.

I think what you're really seeing is how much people value a good user experience, not how little they value privacy. Killing it on the UX end has always been a thing that OSS projects and software has struggled with and lack of growth there is, IMO, part of what has gotten us to where we are.
Even if they had your IP address, they would not be able to track which sites you are visiting on the onion network anyway. You could just be visiting the CIA's Official Onion Site.
I don't know how someone technical could think the FBI cares about some random IP addresses visiting dark.fail. Do you also think the FBI uses their VB.NET GUI to cyberhack-backtrace this IP address list to arrest people for the pre-crime of looking for DDG's/BBC's .onion site?
Having a list of people who visited the site (possible via DNS records) is definitely a way to drastically narrow your suspect pool. Now you don't need to be a global passive adversary - you just sit on the links used by the "bad" people.
What do you mean with that asterisk that you didn't define?

Why do you hate freedom?

I know Zuckerburg is being grilled by Congress this week, but that's an overly harsh thing to say about facebook(corewwwi).
Sometimes this is the only place to go when enough corporate speech zones push out speech they don't like (gab, 8chan, stormfront)
This service is also available through tor, so he/she wouldn't have the IP's to give to the FBI..
You clearly visited that site, have you given your IP address to the FBI?

why a throwaway account btw? I would really want to know you so I avoid anything you ever build.

And you might note the username plays on the name of a known admin.
Did not catch that, thanks for pointing out. Also got a bit emotional..