[jupr]

Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.

Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.

Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.

The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.

Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.

[bronlund]

I think you overestimates the protection Tor provides. We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there, and CIA probably owns half the exit nodes anyways.

[filup]

Maybe provide sources, or point out a specific claim on the Tor project website that you feel overestimates the capabilities or protections.

BGP attacks are largely defeated by onionservices.

And while governments have the ability to create exit nodes, so does anybody.

[john_strinlai]

>We have seen multiple cases of people getting caught on there

as far as i am aware, no one has been caught due to something technical in relation to tor.

it's always something dumb like logging into an email that has the person's real name in it, using a credit card, leaving javascript on, or otherwise making some opsec failure.

[zahlman]

It's increasingly difficult to accomplish much on the Internet without JavaScript, though. This is an era where literal image hosting sites won't show you an image without it; where it's used to reinvent <details> tags, forms, even ordinary hyperlinks.

[pseudalopex]

This could be true. But law enforcers lied how they found evidence in other cases.[1] They could have lied in Tor cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

[judge2020]

iCloud private relay has done more in just a few years than Tor ever has, by being opt-out for iOS users instead of opt-in like Tor. Now platforms can’t rely on IP based reputation, instead relying on either a computational challenge (Cloudflare, Anubis) or de-anonymization (recaptcha relying on being signed into a Google account more than anything, especially when using private relay).

[jupr]

That wasn't meant to be an argument against other privacy protecting technologies. I'll take them all. Although you can't just compare apples to apples when you speak of close sources technology. I applaud apple for the long held stance of privacy protections.

And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.

A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.

[inigyou]

I'm using Tor right now! Everyone should. It's too bad that many websites block it, but most of those websites are slop anyway.

[jupr]

Everyone should study the basics on a server backend and full stack web.

If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.

The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.

Tor is first and foremost a router.

Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.

[esseph]

Tor is very much for US overseas intelligence operatives, among other things.

[btilly]

That is who it was created for.

[jupr]

Yet the same technology that protects them, protects the everyday Joe.

The binaries do not discriminate.

[btilly]

Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me.

No. Tor is for the CIA. It won't work for them unless we use it as well. Criminals also find it useful.

It's easy to verify this. Tor was originally written by Paul Syverson, Michael G. Reed, and David Goldschlag. While all three were working at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.

[jupr]

These are the origins of Tor yes. The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them, or placed a wall of ID verification checks.

I encourage everyone to learn about the origins. Even study these people and what they have said in the past. Don't for get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Mathewson.

[mghackerlady]

Yes, that's what it was created for. The internet was created by DARPA and happened to be useful for other things

[bflesch]

Nah, those people use plaintext Gmail as Epstein demonstrated.