[theamk]

Heh, my work has a firewall policy: any activity towards TOR servers flags an alert and makes security contact you. If you don't confirm it was by design, they'll start full scale "computer compromised" procedure. (And if you do confirm it it was by design, then they'll ask you to change that design if possible :) )

I thought it was overly paranoid, but it seems that would have really helped in this case.

[waihtis]

Unless youre doing security research, there close to zero legitimate uses of Tor for the average citizen.

[indrora]

There are plenty of reasons to use Tor. Not only to obfuscate location but to defend against mass surveillance, including that of the state [1]. Remember that Tor was developed originally and funded by the US State Department. Tor makes communications of LBTQ/Anti-authoritarian/journalist individuals safer in a world where the State Department has to put out advisories [2] about traveling while queer, a pride flag sticker is illegal and punishable by death or imprisonment in over 24 countries and journalists are imprisoned for talking to those who speak out.

Tor is an essential tool for all citizens -- Especially those in the US who would be targeted by those who seek infinite, unrestrained power.

[1] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/128/768/403...

[2] https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

[snakeyjake]

Detecting TOR traffic is trivial for state actors who control their local infrastructure. In the PRC, TOR usage is banned and the ban is enforced via packet inspection.

In any nation likely to target residents in the manners you have proposed, using TOR for any appreciable length of time puts a more prominent target on their backs than walking around with a pride flag sewn onto your jacket.

And fingerprinting TOR usage via deep packet inspection is the fancy-pants way of doing it. Many nations like Ethiopia, Kazakstan, China, and Iran also just prevent routing to known TOR exit nodes-- and they're all known.

Meanwhile TOR is like "just use a proxy brah", seemingly completely unaware that proxy usage is also detectable and that giving advice like that to vulnerable persons in unsafe countries is dangerous to those persons.

So then you get to the "Swiss cheese model" of disaster prevention where in order to safely use TOR you have to use it through a VPN that you connect to through a proxy (all of which is STILL detectable) and any mistake along the way due to not being absolutely and completely perfect in the configuration or usage of TOR will put you at risk of automated detection.

edit: you also, as a vulnerable user in an unsafe country who may not have consistent access to the internet or even speak English, must be stringently up-to-date on the software versions (e.g. the Ricochet vulnerability) of every product used in the TOR chain, which seems... unreasonable.

[pphysch]

> Tor is an essential tool for all citizens -- Especially those in the US who would be targeted by those who seek infinite, unrestrained power.

This is quite euphemistic. Tor exists to provide telecommunications support to US govt-backed political operations in foreign countries.

The individual welfare of people does not factor in. Take for instance the recent murder of an American citizen by $GOODGUYS vs. when another American citizen died under $BADGUYS captivity. Totally different treatment and rhetoric. People don't matter, politics does.

We should not falsely romanticize State Department programs at the expense of human rights.

[mppm]

In theory, yes. In practice, the safety that Tor provides is in numbers, and the numbers just don't look good any more. By using Tor, you are entering a fairly small pool that you share with legit criminals and will be blocked and targeted accordingly. A good VPN like Mullvad is the saner option for most people.

[whilenot-dev]

In practice, even corporate greed steps in your way here... I can't even access reddit with Mullvad if I don't onionize it.

[tptacek]

You could make the same point without kicking up all the drama by saying there are close to zero legitimate reasons for a work computer on a work network to be reaching out to Tor.

[setopt]

I’d 100% understand if they want to block it… but for a while I ran my home server as a Tor hidden service just to get free dynamic DNS and NAT traversal, and could SSH into it from my office by accessing Tor from there. That’s arguably a legitimate use case.

[tptacek]

Literally one of the specific, enumerated use cases corporate networks have for blocking this stuff.

[setopt]

I should perhaps have added this wasn’t a “corporate” network but a university network. As a PhD candidate that was my “work network”.