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by xbadxapple
4365 days ago
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Unfortunately the mainstream media has taken a stern stance of building a negative image of those services. You always get to read how it's full of pedophiles and drug traffic. The fact that such services help dissident journalists, bloggers or political figures or are invaluable in case of repressive internet shut-down seems to escape their spotlight. This generalization of tech phenomenon which can be used for both good and bad deeds has led to extreme paranoia. Hence such harsh sweeps when dealing with it, I guess. Those who are under the effect of the judgement are also a part of yet another generalization encompassing an undefined, ridiculously big network of "criminals". |
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The long term downward trend in the trustedness of institutions has been steadily undermining this argument which is why, I think, things like Tor exist at all, but public attitudes change slowly.
In the case of Tor, it's slower / less convenient than usual browsing and is otherwise the same except for being more anonymous. So it's very easy to plant the idea in people's minds that there's no point in using it unless you're up to no good. And the Tor project doesn't really help here - they talk about the legitimate uses on their website but don't point to concrete examples (iirc), e.g. they say the military use it, but provide no real evidence of that. I think actually the UK child porn censors use it as well because it's a source of free proxies and child porn hosting sites know their IP addresses and block them, which is a pretty funny story, but this was mentioned in some talk and I don't think it's on their website.
To make things worse, the internet itself is rapidly converging on the consensus that Tor isn't worth it. Witness the widespread blocking of exit nodes that occurs these days. Tor is losing the argument not just in court but elsewhere too.
IMHO running Tor exits will not become less dangerous any time soon unless Tor finds a way to significantly boost "obviously legit" usage. For that they'd need to provide a Tor browser that isn't geared towards the total-anonymity-or-die crowd. VPN services like HotSpot Shield absolutely dominate Tor in terms of usage because they're much easier t use and don't do stuff like disable Flash and constantly wipe cookies, which makes them much more popular for people trying to evade national censorship but not treat the destination service as hostile.