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?
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!!!!
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.
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?
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...
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..."
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!!
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