Slashdot Mirror
EFF Promotes Freenet-like System Tor
The submitter continues "It also allows you to install Tor-aware apps, such as an HTTP proxy (for private browsing), or maybe private P2P? Unlike Freenet, it doesn't use massive encryption (as far as I can tell) and relies more on something called onion routing to randomly bounce requests between other Tor proxies, thus obfuscating the IP of the original client. So it allows you to browse regular Internet sites! Maybe it should be considered more of an 'open-source' Anonymizer? But I don't know if it's actually Open Source - you can download the source (and compile it yourself) but I don't know if the developers are letting anyone else touch their code. They are, however, looking for contributors and other forms of help. And, finally, they're hoping people will start running Tor servers!" It's open source, however contributions are handled.
The EFF is a light in a dark wilderness. How amazing that a group of people so talented, experienced, and dedicated to digital liberty can come together and accomplish so much. Episode #74 of This American Life features EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow's touching account of a romance that blossomed between him and a wonderful woman he met at a convention. (Computer geeks take heed... play this story for a girl you fancy and see if it softens her heart.)
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
If they really want to sniff you, what is to stop them from sniffing at that unavoidable first hop?
What degree of obfuscation is enough to thwart determined tracking attempts?
I'm sure this network will be used to share protected speech and not copyrighted binaries.
</sarcasm>
If it's not encrypting and just passing packets around then it sounds like the AT&T research Crowds proxy they were distributing a while ago. (it used to live at this page but I see it's gone now.)
Trolling is a art,
Unlike freenet, which I have tried to use for years and never got it to work properly, this actually works. Five minutes after I installed TOR i'm actually surfing the internet, anonymously, at decent speeds. Unlike freenet, i'm not stuck in a chatroom while someone tells me... Just wait 4-5 days for your node to associate with the network....
TOR is great, go EFF, making me proud to be a member!!!!
Well Freenet HAS NEVER WORKED
A fork of Freenet has been popular in Japan.
But the Freenet project itself has been a huge failure.
Thankgod some other people are working on creating something that might actually work.
...is it good for distributing binary content that might be in violation of copyright laws of some countries?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I, for one, do not use peer-to-peer file sharing for any reason. However the answer to secure peer-to-peer file sharing is so simple it's right in front of our noses.
First, encrypt the file you want to send with GPG, make the decrypting password "1" or "A" or something that simple. If "any one else" decrypts the file and prosecutes you for it, you can get off by using the DMCA. That's right, the DMCA works for people too.
Under the DMCA, the sender and receiver are the only two authorized to decrypt that file. If "any one else" decrypts it, even though they know the password, they are guilty of violating the DMCA. Now, from what I understand about the law, without a warrant to decrypt your encrypted file, it's not admissable in court because a law was broken to retrieve the file contents. No court likes "bad" cops, it's bad PR for judges.
Current peer-to-peer technologies that are wide open are sufficient to carry "secure" information. Expending the extra energy to encrypt the file before it's sent is the problem. People need to stop being lazy.
"If technology is plausible, we acheive it. Now pull the lever and 'beer me'."
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
This exactly seem revolutionary. Are there some features not covered in the whitepage that aren't currently available to "power" users today? Or is this simply an idiot proof proxy tool?
Two questions come immediately to mind:
1) Can spam be sent through Tor?
2) Can spammers collect data by running a Tor server of their own?
I checked the site's FAQ but couldn't find answers there.
The site says it's partially funded by DARPA. Keep that in mind ... It might be backdoored so as to spy on bloodthirsty terrorists.
System Tor... I think that's in Devonshire, right?
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
Besides, getting rid of anonymity would help with the spam crap.
In fact, I don't see anything positive in anonymity.
And wait for my traffic to pass through some hippy's 386 running linux? I sure hope this requires some minimum hardware and bandwith to allow participation.
I wonder if this could somehow be a case where it is not cost effective for RIAA/MPAA to track down the sharer of a particular file? I mean, they could do track down at least ONE file-sharer and then sue that person. But is just one person being sued serve as a sufficient deterrent to stop many filesharers?
Right now, there are hundreds or even thousands of file sharers being sued (or being threatened, or getting letters etc). That threat serves as a real deterrent. But if it were too costly for them to detect hundreds of file sharers, the threat posed may not deter many people from sharing files. So, if so, then Tor could be a real plus for file sharers.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
I love Freenet, but it's a mess of a program using a rickety network. Long live Tor!
Well, so much for that. *badaboom*
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
Seems like a great system, but I just cant understand this statement: "Currently, Tor development is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tor was initially designed and developed as part of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Routing program with support from ONR and DARPA."
*Puts on tinfoil-hat* isn't the guys at *.mil making their jobs harder by doing this? anonymous "terrorists" communicating freely without any traces, or do they already have this covered in the system? a honeypot?
TOR Books, one of the largest publishers of Science Fiction and Fantasy in North America *might* have some problem with this...Methinks that I should let David Hartwell know...and the wonderful people at EFF...
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
That one is both Funny and Insighful.
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
Just a quick FYI, TOR is an onion routing system, meaning that the data is passed between TOR proxies until it reaches it's destination. This means that eventually you still need to fetch the data from a server, which means that the server can still be put under attack or taken down.
FreeNet is much more robust as you inject content and then it is stored in many nodes. Thus, it can't be taken down. Furthemore, in FreeNet different parts of the data are obtained from different sources, preventing more work that could be done with traffic analysis.
To say that TOR is like FreeNet is to seriously discount the features of FreeNet. TOR is a system for running Onion proxies. FreeNet is a completely anonymized hosting and content distribution system.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Freenet is unusable for me because of its java nature (for ideological reasons - it is absurd to require something as vehemently antifree as Java for freenet).
/.ed.
What is Tor implemented in?
This is an honest question, not a troll.
No, I can't "check out the link" - because it's just been
... it must be intended primarily for satirical content.
Where can I get some EFF grant money?
Freenet - but not in Java?! Sign me up. Keep that nasty java off my system. GRSec and PaX don't like it and keep killing it off anyway.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Let me get this straight. As a TOR node, my computer will request information from regular web sites unencrypted. This means that when someone requests e.g. child porn on the network, and my node is chosen to retrieve it, my IP will be the one logged?
You are in for a world of hurt if you run a TOR node. Since you are perfectly aware of all plain HTTP requests your node makes, you are likely to stand trial for contributory copyright infringement, import/export/distribution of child porn, conspiracy to [whatever] and so on. Since I assume by default it doesn't log anything to give you someone to blame it on, they pin it on you.
I would honestly never run a TOR node. If I did, I would firewall it to only allow connections to other TOR nodes, i.e. be a pure leech on the network. Anything else is to expose yourself for a wide range of legal disasters. Freenet had this right. You must not know what you are transmitting. This idea is fundamentally flawed and I'm amazed that the EFF would support it.
And beyond that, from the brief techincal discussion, you have a single point of failure in the directory server. Gather a small botnet, compromise the server and present the botnet as the routing nodes. You control all the keys, you decrypt everything. Or just a simple DDoS attack, so you don't find any nodes to route through. Overall, I'm not impressed.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
What about a network (possibly implemented in VPNs), where all packets are NAT'd by each node. Anyone viewing the traffic would never know if the request originated on that host, or if it was a host 10 hops away. (Apart from the TTL, which could be randomised between 200 and 255 anyway).
Obviously, this would still break things that don't play well with NAT.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Disclaimer: I'm using windows 2000, not linux.
WinMX: Install, run, use the slick GUI, get speedy transfers.
KaZaA Lite: Install, run, use the slick GUI, get speedy transfers.
eMule: Install, run, use the slick GUI, get speedy transfers.
DC++: Install, run, use the slick GUI, get speedy transfers.
Gnucleus: Install, run, use the slick GUI, get speedy transfers.
Freenet: Install, run, suffer through the web-based GUI, and groan as it gobbles up all your memory and CPU time while taking ages to load a page.
Tor: Install, run, stare at a console window that says
Dec 22 13:17:21.875 [notice] tor_init(): Tor v0.0.9.1. This is experimental software. Do not rely on it for strong anonymity.
Dec 22 13:17:26.859 [notice] circuit_send_next_onion_skin(): Tor has successfully opened a circuit. Looks like it's working.
Inexcusable. Next!
Hi there! I'm Chris Palmer from EFF. I am working with the Tor developers, so I know a bit about it. I'll try to clear up some questions and misconceptions people seem to have.
:)
:) Tor works. It is stable, many bugs have been fixed, and the protocol is moderately stable. Tor does not crash randomly or eat all your memory. What's in flux is bigger picture items, such as "How can we reduce our dependency on the central directory server" and "Wouldn't a GUI configuration tool be nifty?"
1. Spam? Well, spammers already have much better tools than Tor. Namely, botnets. The Tor network currently doesn't support the kind of bandwidth usage spammers can chew up. By their willingness to break the law, spammers and criminals already have good tools to hide their network origin. Tor doesn't really help them. Plus, the default Tor exit policy is to block port 25.
2. Free/open source? Yes, three-clause BSD. EFF would not financially support a non-free/open source project!
3. Do you have to trust the nodes? You have to trust the entry node and the exit node. The entry node can be on your own computer, which I highly advise people to do. It's easy to install on all platforms, so that shouldn't be a hurdle. As far as trusting the exit node: Yes, the exit node can see the plaintext of your communications. That is why you should always use end-to-end encryption, anyway! Remember, all normal Internet routers in your route can read your traffic; Tor is actually BETTER because traffic is strongly encrypted (AES, multiple times) while inside the Tor network.
So, you actually have to trust Tor a bit less than regular Internet routes.
Use encryption.
4. Is it like Freenet/Crowds/Anonymizer? Yes, and no. It is like somewhat like those systems in goals, but the design is different. For example, unlike Freenet, Tor helps you talk to the real Internet. Unlike Anonymizer, Tor uses a whole network of proxies, not a single proxy; and the proxies are generic SOCKS proxies, not specifically HTTP.
5. Version number is too low. Is this alpha software? Roger and Nick are very modest.
6. Is there a backdoor? Well, you tell me. The source code is open. Is there a backdoor in other free software you like?
7. Minimum bandwidth requirement? For exit and middleman nodes, yes, you should have a reasonable pipe and a stable machine. "Reasonable" pipe can mean a good DSL connection. Crappy nodes can degrade the network for those poor saps whose circuit goes through one. That is why the directory server operators won't list your server unless it meets basic stability and bandwidth requirements.
I looked on there for music and movies and the only thing i could see was 'Kill Bill'.
There is no reasonble way to search freenet.
In Tor's case there is a centralised global list of all peers which must be added to manually by Tor's developers. This is fine with a small number of users, for which Tor clearly works well, but isn't practical when dealing with large numbers of users.
Freenet, for all its faults, is designed to deal with potentially millions of unreliable peers. It is its ability to do this that makes it such an ambitious project, and makes any comparision between it and Tor a situation of apples and oranges.
Alice visits Bob's childporn server which the FBI is monitoring. If you are the last encyrpted hop and you fetch the childporn they have your IP and you are in trouble.
I mean, why do you even need something like this? If you don't have anything to hide, there shouldn't be a problem with your internet chats being monitored.
BTW, click here
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Then where do we draw the line between "Omg, technology for terrorists" and real useful software? What about instant messanger systems?
Does AIM and MSN user = Terroist?
No.
But they can very easily use such software can they not?
What about Planes? Maybe we should stop using planes.. I mean terrorists can use them to fly into our buildings.
Why are you drawing the line at this piece of software? Where should this line be? The further it goes into our freedoms...
We Have Freenet, MUTE, iip, WASTE, Ants etc, etc. What they are lacking is a base. This lack of base is do to certain unavoidable (or leaste very difficult to avoid) constraints of the problem
In order to have a useful p2p network it must be realitivly fast and easy to navigate. In order for the network to be anymous and safe from centralized attacks, it must be decentralized. Unfortunetly Anonymous and fast download seem to be indirectly proportional. Decentralization requires that packets bounce all over the network which results in lower download speeds. Centralization however fast, will result in it being easy for some one or some group to target the center and easily bring the whole community down. People are not going to use a system which is too slow to be useful.
Solving the anymouse p2p problem is very difficult to do when you wish to have realitively reasonable download rates and not too much house keeping in the way of covering your tracks. To think of an analogy; consider haveing a town with three types of people, Reds, Blacks and Whites. The objective is for the Blacks to figure a way to send mail to each other in some way that the Blacks will not know what they are sending or where it came from
Reds own what Blacks are mailing. So Blacks want to hide from Reds and Reds want to find out who the Blacks are. Every Black can easily know who is another Black. Yet every Red must assume that every other person that they talk to or mail through is a Black. Whites are a noise factor and distract both Black's and Red's. Blacks, ultimately, are trying to behave as much like Whites as possible while still being able to send information that the Blacks would not have them send.
Tors meathod of solving this problem (i.e. being a protocol for the Blacks to send mail) is to have everyone who is Black act exactly like a Black and nothing like a White while allowing any Red to hide easily in the community of the Blacks. Tracfic anaylisis may be more difficult but it will be easyer for the Reds to determine which trafic to monitor.
The whole problem is interesting to think about and any solution that I can think of would require that the complexity of determing who is Black would grow NP in the number of Blacks while the the levels of indirection of any packet would grow linerially or else the network would be too slow to be of much more use then a chat protocol and for that I guess we have iip.
At any rate I look forward to seeing what the Hacker community can do to bring the idea of an anonymous internet to life.
And in ten years from now, when ONLY this kind of software will protect your freedom to speak, what will you say? We must fight and write our tools now, not wait that we're forbidden to do anything before moving our asses...
See here.
The Freenet concept is great and Ian Clarke must be applauded, but it really needs an implementation that is more user-friendly and lower latency before it can become really popular.
I know that there are a lot of technical problems that keep these things from happening right now, but I have hope that they'll figure out something before it is impossible to have any real privacy on the net.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
The normal people being the ones killing and torturing people in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya, Guantanamo Bay?
I'm impressed. After only a couple minutes, this is working perfectly! One more vote that, yes, this works.
As someone who has watched, helped with, and discussed various anonymous networks from Pipenet through Onion routing and Tor I can give you the quick summary for why NRL was interested in anonymous browsing (because when they first came out with the Onion network stuff it really was a surprise.)
.mil or .gov site.
Sometimes, government agencies would prefer it if web queries did not show up in the server's logs as coming from a
Just knowing what someone is reading or researching is a good source of intel, some government agencies see more benefit to this than the downside of potential terrorist uses.*
Jim
* anyway, if you work for a big governement agency you have the resources to treat these sorts of networks like a big black box and link up the endpoints. This is a fatal flaw to _all_ real-time anonymous networks. A big attacker can treat all of the fancy games you play in the middle of network as noise and just link up "message X went into dark network at time T and a message close to the size of message X came out of the network at time T +1, followed by a similarly linkable message going back the other way..."
It seems to me that Tor (and possibly all onion-type concepts, although I dont know a huge amount about them as a whole) actually increases the footprint of any given request/response by increasing the amount of hops taken from source to destination. Could it be that it increases anonymity of a connection but also potentially decreases the privacy instead? Couple this with payload analysis (HTTP packets having obvious information about destination at least) and you have a powerful tracking mechanism
For example, consider this: Freenet is designed to support millions of unreliable peers. Last time I checked, Tor uses a centralised list of peers which is manually edited by Tor's developers.
This is not to say that Freenet is better than Tor, they have different goals. They may sound similar based on a one sentence explanation, but as soon as you scratch the surface you see that they don't have much in common beyond that.
ISPs have clear access logs as to what subscriber held what IP when, should the police come knocking. You do not. If all TOR nodes keep a record over what URLs were requested from (uplink), you would continue up to the originator and the entire point of TOR will disappear. In addition, there are common carrier exceptions in the law which would not apply to you.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's a completely different system.
Tor allows you to access existing internet resources anonymously.
Freenet allows you to PUBLISH and access resources anonymously - if it works.
Solving a problem between communicating cells being terrorist or otherwise is a much simpler task then gereral p2p. There is a level of "speak easy" that just doesn't exist in the general p2p world when talking about these small communities. Don't let this kind of consideration turn you off to privacy if for not anything else but that it is what the terrorists want.
Somebody quick! Make a FireFox extension that adds a button to the toolbar that says "Switch to TOR mode" or something to that effect.
It would be nice if TOR were easy to turn on and off within a given browser or other http-aware client. I can't see need the for use TOR 100% of the time, especially since there is a performance hit. And it seems like it would be a pain in the ass to have to reconfigure the browser's proxy settings each time you want to use TOR for browsing/downloading.
I'd take a crack at it myself, but I'm no code monkey. I'm a documentation nerd. If anybody wants to develop this, let me know and I'll do the docs and help files.
Transistors and Beer!!
I trust you will immediately give up any and all vehicles that you own. Obviously, to drive a car is to condone the very technology that makes the terrorists' car bombs possible.
Be a patriot -- boycott Ford!
Look, you don't know who I am. I'm anonymous. I don't really want you knowing who I am because some of you are freaks (no offense). It works and it's all I really need.
Is this REAL anonymity? Not really. If I come on here and say I'm going to kill George Bush they'll find out who I am in a heartbeat. I don't really have a problem with that. Basically the only people who are not anonymous are criminals. This is simply because in the vast sea of people on the internet who really gives a crap who "Smilin" is unless he does something wrong. You don't like it? Don't pirate software and don't threaten dubya!
I WANT criminals to be tracked down by IP and prosecuted. It's just difficult enough to find out who someone is to stop most freaks (like you guys, no offense) but not difficult enough that law enforcement can't do it when they need to. I would rather things stay in this false illusion of anonymity state. Thank you very much.
P.S. For you secret service guys who just read this: No worries. You can all basically just go take naps anyway. No one is going to kill dubya while he has Cheney next in line for assasination insurance.
If it indeed works as an anonymizer, what prevents its users from scanning/cracking web servers?
...maybe I'll just dig up the link to what happened with the JAP proxy network, providing pretty much exactly the same service:
Net anonymity service back-doored
Basicly, they were given the choice of backdooring it or shutting it down. Yes, the whole network. They did install a backdoor (still with source), got found out but they didn't exactly have much trust left.
Can someone explain to me why the exact same will not happen to this service? Any reason why TOR servers would have greater legal immunity? I don't see it, at least.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't think this system will be usable for piracy. Have you ever used <hat foil="tin">Freenet</hat>? Because of all the hopping though random nodes, "random" routes and encrypted traffic it's quite slow.
Take the example of the average "anonymous proxy" on the internet. After someone finds the proxy, it usually takes about 5 to 10 hours before the proxie's bandwith is completely saturated making it unusable. Even if Tor is to loadbalance all it's nodes, it's still going to be SLOW with the added encryption etc. Remember kids, using proxies that are close to you isn't anonimity but asking for problems with the law (usually why people want to use anonymous proxies is to avoid problems their employer/government could create).
Lastly, most anonymous networks are unreliable by nature. Freenet is unreliable because it drops "unpopular" keys and their content in favour of popular keys. Anonymous relays (eg mixmasters) are known to drop messages at random.
What's about GNU's own GPL'd freenet "clone" GNUNet?
I've successfully used it to get some pr0n, at decent speeds. You might also search it for "Billy Joel" to see my additions to the network.
*IAA might not be able to sue the actual file sharers on Tor, but it looks like it might be vulnerable to the same attack that was use on Bit Torrent: go for the trusted nodes or the servers that maintain the lists of trusted nodes on grounds of contributory copyright infringement.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
Tor already provides the means for people to run a tor node as only a router (add the line: reject *:* in your torrc), not an exit node. Hence, your IP will never download kiddie porn or anything like that.
This sounds an awful lot like the network started by the guys a ZeroKnowledge (now defunct something like 4 years). Can someone summarize how this is different?
for me is not the speeds, or the difficulty in implementing it... it's the child porn.
Sorry, but I just can't get past that. I hear all the posters and academics argue about "free speech means tolerating speech you don't like"... but free speech != exploitation of the innocent. Adult porn is one thing... you can at least make the argument that they're consenting adults just making a living... child porn is simply vile... it's sexual exploitation of someone too weak to fight, and mentally unable to understand and/or consent.
I'm not attempting to play the "won't you think of the children?" card. I'm an EFF member, and a believer in free speech, but there's a bright line there for me. It's my job, literally, to take care of children who have been either physically abused, sexually abused, or both. Those kids are often brought straight to the ER, where Children's Services and I try to pick up the pieces. Maybe I'm too close to the issue, because it's simply visceral for me; I cannot stand the thought of aiding and abetting those kinds of acts, or encouraging the slime who get their jollies from that kind of thing.
I'm a free speech supporter, but child porn on my computer? I just can't get there.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
They could go after them just as much as they could go after a proxy server for copyright infringement.
"The EFF is a light in a dark wilderness. "
Does that mean we like lawyers now?
Tor supports something called a "hidden service" which allows you to serve something, such as a web site, ftp, or dare I say, a bittorent link.
The neat thing is, you can serve the service without anyone knowing your IP address. So you would share a link such as follows: http://6sxoyfb3h2nvok2d.onion/ (which is the tor hidden service wiki BTW). The Tor servers "meet in the middle", thus hiding the originating serving ip address. Read here for more on this functionality.
This could really shut the door on XXAA type organizations looking to hunt down people for litigous purposes.
"Law enforcement officials who decrypt the virus to reverse engineer it would be in violation of the DMCA."
*raises finger*
Oh, never mind. All you legal eagles are too clever.
Tor is great. I've been playing with it for a while - the sheer simplicity of setup makes it fantastic, and it's highly amusing to go to whatismyip.com half a dozen times and get different IPs.
Once I get the firewall box I want set up I plan to make one port link directly into Tor, so that anything plugged into that port is shunted 100% into the Tor network. Right now you've sort of got to trust that your program really is punching everything through the SOCKS proxy - not all programs are really reliable about that, plus the program can still see your IP if you're not behind a firewall.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
mod me down mod me down this is a test, webpage hasn't changed for the past 20 mins after disabling tor...
Was considering starting off a project like this a week or so ago.
Will be good to contribute to an open source project like this.
Though when http://freedom.net/ tried this years ago they suddenly stopped it.. Was not sure if this was due to legal issues or server strain.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
This was cool, but now it's getting slooow. They need to add a simpler way to become a server (or force you to become one, like with Bittorrent), so that the network doesn't get crunched by too many clients. Right now the server doesn't work through NAT without some fancy footwork. This seems like perfect candidate code for eXeem (or whatever those Suprnova guys were working on was called).
...but what exactly is the incentive to actually help the TOR network? Seems to me that you can just leech as much as you want, give nothing. And each byte I download gets multiplied by as many nodes as I route through. Right now, it would appear they have a small userbase and mostly volunteer providers. What would happen if it got exposed to say, the slashdot userbase? Or people in general?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
As a civil libertarian I love the idea, and I would be happy to run a Tor server if I could restrict what filetypes I pass through. I'm not interesting in helping people pass kiddie porn or pirated movies through my server (which I assume would be a primary use of this), so I would want to restrict it to text and html mimetypes. I looked through the FAQ and documentation and didn't see any mention of this.
Any developers here that can comment on if a feature similar to this is planned for a future release?
501 Not Implemented
Copyrighted binaries do not count as expression / speech?
I guess child pornography only counts as free speech, and everyone can be against that I guess.
Your post is irrational.
Evil people will always exist and they will misuse whatever technology is available.
Evil people are not stupid.
By refusing to advance your technology you insure the victory of those who wish to destroy you.
Perhaps you should reconsider.
"It was speculation. If you have a reason why it wouldn't work, why not tell us?
I know -- it's because you're an asshole. "
1) I'd rather be an asshole, than take the fall because I thought the law was a bunch of patsys.
2) There's no point in explaining "why not". No one listens anyway.
You can still look at network traffic and analyze where and when packets are sent and recieved. In a plain network it will be quite obvious where they go, where they "enter" and "exit" the network. There are many countermeasures, like padding/splitting packets to fixed sizes, fake traffic, bucket fallover (mixmaster networks), blending local traffic in where there'd normally be fake traffic etc., but it is far from automatic, nor is it trivial. However, you need to crawl before you can run. These are all fairly sophisticated attacks.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I don't think any illegal porn is a problem for Freenet. It is too difficult to set up, for one thing... I don't like what people on alcohol do, either. You should know that Alcohol is a big factor in child abuse and household violence - But would bringing back Prohibition be a good thing? Now software piracy- that's something that tech saavy people who are aware of Freenet might want and be tempted by.
it lets you download off normal HTTP sites
Have you metaroderated recently?
You miss the point entirely. This is designed to hide your location. AIM is not designed to do that. This is like saying, "Register the gun to 5000 people so when someone commits a crime with it they can't be tracked down."
And you know as well as I do that 90% or more of the people who elect to install this software will do so for illegal reasons.
without my knowledge? Sounds like it from a discussion above.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I swear to God that nearly every article filed under YRO is about some new hip flavor of software that will, inevitably, be used to unlawfully distribute intellectual property.
One man's pirate is another man's freedom fighter.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
Overall it's a cool app, and has it's purposes, but for everyday surfing it is god-awful slow (since it goes through proxies). And yes, I have RFTA and used the program. No, I'm not new here.
I applaud EFF's support of Tor. It provides a means for free communication from China. Anonymity helps to assure (but not guarantee) the safety of a Tibetan lad tortured and raped by the Chinese as he uses Tor or Tor-like technologies to relay the story of his plight. In this way, we in the West can learn the extent of the suffering of the Tibetan people.
I'm disappointed with the EFF, in my opinion the money would have been better spent defending princple in the legal system, not in Java.
Distributed proteome folding @ WorldCommunityGrid.org
Team Slashdot - Members:#1 Run Time:#1 Points:#1 Results:#1
I'll take a bet you get bit by a shark over being sued by the **AA any day. : P
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
You have systematically misrepresented everything I have said. Asshole.
As Voltaire said, and I paraphrase here, "I may not like what you say, but I'll support unto my death your right to say it." Ideally, in a truly anonymous system, you DON'T KNOW what traffic is routing through your system. Just as your neighbor can't hear your conversations at the dinner table, you can't hear his.
Do you not know the difference between ideas and kiddie porn? I am dedicated to supporting the free transmission of _ideas_, including the repugnant idea that you should be able to distribute kiddie porn. But I am not in favour of facilitating child abuse, and that seems to be a logical primary use for this Tor system as the people involved in that are increasingly desperate to avoid detection.
Don't you get it? I am not interested in trying to control the flow of ideas, no matter how repugnant they are. That is spefically what I want to aid, and I would be willing to donate my bandwidth to support that. But a system to help pedophiles get more porn, I am not willing to donate to. It's not that complicated.
Your comments are strange - you want people to share (supposedly) copyrighted movies without fear of punishment, but you don't expect them to pay for the bandwidth
I think that people should be allowed to share movies via P2P, but *I* don't want to donate my money or bandwidth do *their* sharing.
but why do YOU get to dictate what is and isn't right?
I get to dictate nothing. I refuse to donate my bandwidth to support child pornography, but would be more than happy to donate bandwidth to support the dissemination of banned ideas. It's my fucking donation, so I can decide if I want to donate it or not. If this project doesn't suit what I am willing to support, I am not dictating to them... I'm simply not going to help them because they don't meet my terms.
501 Not Implemented
I swear to God that every automobile produced in a plant is some hip flavor of human body crushing device that will undoubtably be used to kill children.
The grandparent seemed to be insinuating that it's immoral to care only about being associated with child porn, by caring only about being associated with it, not about carrying it at all. The reply was pointing out that if you think it's immoral to carry information blindly, then being a postman is immoral.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Sharing the torrent links that nobody wants to deal with anymore...
Maybe the perfect medium!
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
I don't know. Aren't most being settled for $2000 right now? As long they don't spend more than $2000 for each settlement, then they can continue. They aren't doing this for money, they are trying to strike fear in people. As long as they break even or better, then will continue indefinitely.
0.05% (500th of a percent)
0.05% is a 20th of a percent, not a 500th.
While the tone of this post suggests that Tor is in some way inferior to Freenet, this couldn't be further from the truth. Tor works TODAY and allows you to proxy any SOCKS-compatible application (damn-near every networked app) through the anonymizing network, this includes SSH, e-mail, web browsing, etc.
Freenet on the other hand is built for transporting bulk data in an anonymous fashion and is thus probably better suited to P2P file sharing - it will be impossible to ever tunnel SSH over Freenet.
This assumes your Tibetan lad has secure access to the Internet. If all traffic is monitored at the border, the volume of traffic is light, and can be easily traced to it's point of origin, I don't see how you maintain anonymity,
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that pornography is protected speech. So, yes, the network will be used for "protected speech".
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
This program is way awsome but beware if you use this to access your paypal account and paypal sees your ip as coming from outside the US your account will be closed and you will lose your money.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
This HOWTO will have you browsing the web anonymously in a few minutes. (No jokes about "Not unless you have to emerge X and Firefox first!")
It also explains how to get Gaim and other SOCKS enabled network clients to use tor.
Sharks are opportunists not statisticians.
Show them a wound and they will strike without mercy. Never give a sucker an even break.
Hey, why did you have to point that out? : ) Aren't we all allowed to make mistakes? I just finished my crak-pipe right before that post!
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
I saw the name and I thought it had to do with Bittorrent. I saw freenet and my heart skipped. I thought someone had my idea and did something about it. Alas, no.
My idea, is a marriage of IRC and Freenet, mostly text-based, but completely distributed and anonymous. You could have channels to meet, discuss, and list torrents and moderate them a la suprnova. The moderation would prevent Kazaa like travesties like getting a virus instead of what you wanted. You could shut down individual trackers still, of course, but the torrent distribution system would be impossible to shut down. And since it's mostly text based, it would be much faster than Freenet, I hope. And not in Java.
But, I don't know how to program. So I can't make it. Someday someone else will have the same idea, I hope.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Tell me how an individual can raise the "common carrier" defense if illegal traffic is being routed through or hosted on his system? I don't think it can be done.
should WalMart close its doors, because it sells food to anybody, even the bad guys?
WalMart is pretty much free to close it's doors to anyone it choses, so long as it does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex or religion, physical or mental handicap. If your behavior is suspect, an inconvenience or danger to other patrons, or to the store's image and reputation, you will be quietly but efficiently shown the way out.
every time someone mentions Freenet on Slashdot, you write an essay equating it with child pornography, then you are...promoting the distribution of child porn on Freenet - you encourage pedophiles..to see what disgusting filth Freenet has to offer, while scaring away the many people who would otherwise use Freenet for legal and moral purposes.
This argument strikes me as altogether too clever and certainly presents a remarkably discouraging portrait of the Slashdot reader as easily frightened, voyeuristic, pedophilic. I think it must remain within bounds to ask whether Freenet's absolutist position on free speech ultimately cripples the network.
Hi there again. There are some more misconceptions about the law and the technology that hopefully I can clear up.
First, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Additionally, the EFF lawyers are preparing a Tor Legal FAQ that might help answer this type of question as well. Keep an eye on the http://tor.eff.org site for updates. (The Legal FAQ will also not be legal advice, but purely informational.)
Okay. First, if you want to help the Tor project/network but don't want to handle unencrypted content or be the exit node that talks to endpoints, then don't run an exit node. Set your ExitPolicy to "reject *:*".
Second, a Tor operator, whether the server is in exit or middleman or mode, has no prior knowledge of the content that might pass through the server. Nor should you capture traffic (with e.g. tcpdump) -- doing so might be a violation of U.S. wiretap laws.
Third, all proxy services, anonymizing and other, are subject to the same issues. Note that Anonymizer.com, AOL, FreeNet, Tor, any given Squid proxy, all have the same content issues. So far, no operators of such services have been sued for providing those services.
Finally, other posters have stated that ISPs have "common carrier" status and thus are not liable for carrying potentially unlawful content. ISPs enjoy no special common carrier immunities for bits they carry, and have no special defenses against this potential liability that shouldn't also apply to a Tor operator (in the U.S).
My point is that if the DMCA hampers the execution of law enforcement, then the DMCA is a fucked up law.
It doesn't. The DMCA, 17 USC 1201, contains an exemption for any circumvention performed as part of legit law enforcement:
Are you sure about that? In Miller v. California, the Court said that obscenity is not protected speech, and defined it as such:
This much has been categorically settled by the Court, that obscene material is unprotected by the First Amendment.
[...]
(a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Kois v. Wisconsin, supra, at 230, quoting Roth v. United States, supra, at 489;
(b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and
(c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.
Since I doubt that much of the pornography one would find on such a service would meet the above tests, it would generally be unprotected speech and subject to restriction by the states. Although the question of states' authority over online transmissions is another matter entirely...
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Let's begin with the most basic question, can you copyright the virus?
I suspect the argument would meet with the same hostility you would face if you argued for copyright protection of an encrypted blackmail letter, ransom note, forged commercial paper, etc.
In general there is no way you can give legal cover to an artifact created with criminal intent.
Indeed, IP "piracy" is the largest civil disobedience movement in history. Larger than the independence movement in India, and larger by far than the civil rights movement of the 1960s in the U.S. Well, it might not be as large as the war for drug freedom, but it's pretty close.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Though with no corporation backing this project
/.) to admit that the US Govt, DoD and DoE have backed huge amounts of open source software --- ooh! maybe the guys at LLNL put a backdoor in tcpdump when they developed it to not display certain "govt spy packets" !
Right because Tor was developed for the US Navy, not a corporation and the developer has said in the past that they (the US Navy) hoped that civilian traffic would help drown out their traffic.
But it is not "cool" (esp. here on
I contend that the US govt has probably put out more lines of FOSS software than any other entity.
If you make a derivitive file then you do own the copyright. You of course do not own the copyright to the original and are therefore limited from making copies of your derivitive. But you still own copyright to your derivitive, as soon as the copyright on the original expires, you can distribute your derivitive without issue, while others will not be able to make copies of your derivitive until your copyright expires.
eg: Practically every Disney movie made, in particular Treasure Planet.
So the solution is to make whatever the legal minimum changes required to classify the work as a derivitive, _then_ "protect" it. You can use the DMCA to protect the work. If they get hold of an unprotected copy however, expect your arse to be sued.
Free-as-in-beer does not make it legal. The creation, distribution, and possession of child pornography remains criminal even when no money changes hands.
It doesn't matter if no one downloads your files, you have made the attempt to distribute through a plausible channel and that is enough to hang you.
"Mere viewing" is not a victimless crime. This is lazy, inexcusable, sloppy, thinking.
Put yourself in the place of the child, her guardians, her counselors, and ask if you would want still photos and videos of her rape to be broadcast over the net, to circulate for all eternity.
You haven't considered the possibility that the child might be identifiable and still at risk. You view her anonymously but do nothing to help. Silence gives consent.
it's point of origin
"its".
The future of P2P encrypted, onion-routing, anonymized file sharing services (of which Freenet and TOR are mere initial hints), will probably require such features as truly distributed, anonymous open-source development team (unsueable, and had to assassinate in its entirety,) using distributed, redundant, moving virtual servers to host the code of the P2P app itself. The development on no account should be centered in the US or countries strongly influenced by US legal heavyhandedness. This truly is the new frontier for freedom.
I look at encrypted, anonymized P2P as the digital equivalent of cash, in the following sense. If cash (anonymous financial transactions, hard to spy on, hard to tax) were being invented now, it would be declared illegal by governments.
But most of us would rather have a cash system
available to us, wouldn't we.
Encrypted anonymized P2P is the same thing, though it doesn't get the grandfathered legality that cash gets.
This is going to be a battle royal, believe me.
It wouldn't surprise me if Bush declares that P2P developers are akin to terrorists. They're agin
us, not fur us. Well it depends on who the us is, don't it. Liberte Egalite Fraternite.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I live in the UK, I want to buy some tunes ( somebody must sometime ;) ) in the UK I am overcharged ( because they can ), If I connect from here to a Continental website for cheaper tunes I can't buy them ( I know there are other ways around this, but this way seems nice and simple) I could with this software as they wouldn't know my true IP address. This must be legal as what they are doing is illegal under The treaty of Rome re free movement of goods and services in the EU
Sometimes, government agencies would prefer it if web queries did not show up in the server's logs as coming from a .mil or .gov site.
.mil and .gov nodes and do onion routing between them so the bad guys wouldn't know it was coming from a .gov or .mil node...oh, wait...
Yeah, right, they'd set up a bunch of
Common sense says they would just get a group of regular old DSL lines and proxy through them.
Freenet is not meant to be a music or movie clearing house, and in fact it doesn't work very well with large files. Freenet is meant to be a way to communicate anonymously. Communication generally takes small amounts of resources. You can compose your dissident newsletter, or your grocery list, or your Jihad manifesto in a few kilobytes. You can fit several entire banned books - or, say, the Diebold incriminating memos - into a megabyte. This is the sort of thing Freenet is truly about, and it works well for that purpose.
You can get MP3s OK on Freenet, but if you're after a 600+MB file, don't bother. You'd be wasting node storage anyway. Freenet users aren't in it for movies and music, there are plenty of places to get that stuff.
I'm sure this network will be used to share protected speech and not copyrighted binaries.
Piracy is the way to fight back at the four letter organisations that currently are engaged in a witchhunt under the obviously false pretense that filesharing is undermining the industries (sales are way up, despite rampant filesharing). Their methods are so unacceptable and their motivation so hollow that we must fight fire with fire.
The best way to take them out is to undermine their markets and saturate the world with free copies of everything so that the piracy really begins to cost them serious money. I'm sure a lot of labels/studios will fold as a result of this but they have only themselves and their delusions to thank.
Afterwards, like the phonix from the ashes, a new business will arise, one that will have the lesson from this firmly in mind: Do not antagonize your customers; if they turn their backs on you, you die.
So? Did you have any sort of point?
Screwdrivers are get used to stab people.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
The children will forever be at risk until the root and means of Child Pornography is removed.
Ban Photography! Ban it now!
"There is no such thing as a legal right to create, possess, or distribute child pornography."
Such wise words deserve ACTION!
Write your congressman! Sue Kodak, Sony, and Panasonic into the ground!! If they don't stop making the tools of child pornography then they are complicit in this scheme to expoit our children. They are the evil behind the Multi BILLION dollar enterprise that is Child Pornography.
Look at how a phone camera corrupted these innocent 16 yr olds. If it were not for the camera insidiously installed on the boys phone, he never would have recorded his consensual 2.37 minute oral session with his girlfriend. It is clear, clear as day, Child pornograpy will exist until the blight of photography is wiped off the face of the earth.
Some may say that Anonymous Photography is NOT child abuse; it's just photography.
I say the child might beg to differ, when images of her rape are distributed over the net.
Please, I beg of you, think of the Children.
A kiddie porn picture (to continue the much-overused example) does not itself constitute an idea. Neither does a copyrighted movie, on the whole. Most ideas can be transmitted in the form of plaintext. (Any counterexamples?)
If text were distributable, Falun Gong and anti-government speech would be protected, and anyone who wanted to advocate snuff films could do so with impunity.
Making it possible to distribute images and movies adds little to this system from the point of view of a civil libertarian. The only case where it would be useful would be things like the videos of civilians being gunned down in Iraq. The downside would be the addition of a massive load increase to the system.
No system could be proof against transmission of kiddie porn and copyrighted videos, but I don't see any harm in trying. Certainly the attempt doesn't instantly make one not a civil libertarian. Possibly we have different views of what that means?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
You still need a real tracker. And anyone smart enough to find the torrent file on freenet is going to connect to that tracker and see everyone who's sharing that file, and if they're MPAA, they're still going to sue them all.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Grr. I never have mod points when I *really* need them. The parent is right on. We should ban photography. But why stop there? Ban private meetings where people might exchange reprehensible or dangerous items. Actually I'm sure the Homeland Security is working on it. *sigh*
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
If you support the idea of you paying for someone else's speech so much, I have some speech of my own. Could you please take out an ad in the New York Times that has my speech on it, paid for at your expense? The content of this comment would be good enough, thanks.
That's what you're asking the other guy to do. To pay the cost for someone else to distribute his ideas. I see no reason he should have to do that. That other person can pay to have his own ideas distributed.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
as long as they don't try to start publishing science fiction books under the Tor name.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
just got email re: usenet spam via my tor proxy thence google groups. sorry guys but no resources here to deal with this crap and no time to generate a reasonable white list so I shut it down.