Slashdot Mirror
Tor Anonymity Network Reaches 100 Verified Nodes
James A. Y. Joyce writes "Tor is an onion routing anonymous network. It routes your data transfers through a series of encrypted links between random nodes in the network; the greater the number of nodes, the greater the anonymity afforded. To commemorate the 100th verified node in the Tor network, the EFF are putting up a request for other organisations and personal users to start up Tor nodes of their own. (Tor has been mentioned on Slashdot twice before.)"
Should be tor.eff.org.
While I think Tor is a great idea, I also think it makes it way too easy to be a bad netizen.
With Tor, you can flood sites and services such as IRC, web boards, instant messaging, and so forth. You could possibly use it to spam as well. All of this would be done by seemingly random IP addresses. In essence, it is an inflated case of Open Proxy Syndrome. The only remedy that the victims have is to block all Tor sites by using some of the RBLs that exist for doing just that. I'd really like to allow legit use of Tor on my services, but there are some jackasses that flood from within Tor that make it impossible.
With anonymity comes a lack of recourse. I understand that this is the point of anonymity and Tor, but it isn't always good.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
The image graphs can be found here.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Tor isn't designed to shield you from timing attacks (read the Tor website - they specifically disclaim this).
Here, I'll try and do it again right now.
I suspect it will work.
And what I did was to turn on my proxy settings in Firefox and then go to an IP check site. My current IP is being reported as other than any in the range of my ISP.
The nodes are what people use to remain anonymous. They nodes themselves need to be well-known so they can be used. 100 people use node X. Someone from China could use node X or someone from America could use Node X or someone from England could use Node X. How do you know where any of those people live, by knowing where node X is?
Answer: You can't know. Hence the people using Node X remain anonymous.
A verified node is not the same as a node, and we now have 100 VERIFIED nodes. RTFFAQ
My node, lemonmirangue, is within the past month, so was probably in the 90s. Someday, I'll get to brag about that.
And dont forget the TOR DNSBL, since you know TOR is just itching to be abused.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
it is 100 verified nodes. To become "verified" is to be "blessed" wiht a certain level of trust. It means your node is held somewhat accountable, it can be trusted to not be intercepting packets. Although every packet is re-encrypted at each node and it knows only the IP of the next and last in the chain, honeypots could do some damage because there is likely to be some incriminating content inside the packet itself - cookies, usernames, etc. So the tor net is setup by default that the first and last hops go through "trusted" nodes but traffic in the middle may go through untrusted nodes - and anyone can setup an untrusted node and, in fact, tor comes OOTB ready to run as an untrusted server if it detects you have a decent connection to do so. So in this respect the TOTAL number of nodes is constantly changing as people enter and leave the network. The total number of nodes is separate and not directly related at all to the number of TRUSTED, registered nodes.
Note that you can be a server without allowing users to make connections from your computer to the outside world. This is called being a middleman server.
The crapflooding doesn't prevent you from speaking at all. At worst it makes your speech harder to find, but it in no way prevents those who want to hear you from listening, or you from speaking.
The most bizarre part of your argument, however, is the assumption that lack of anonymity cannot possibly hurt your ability to speak. I'll grant you that the western world does a much better job of allowing you to say what's on your mind than China does, but if you believe that no censorship happens here, you're sadly mistaken. Consider SLAPP suits, for one example.
Anonmyous communication helps those with suppressed views in the west just as much as it helps those with suppresed views in China. It also helps those who just like to flood the world with crap. The solution is better filtering and ways to reduce the incentive to spam, not eliminating anonymous speech.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
You seem to be using the Sandra-Bullock (read: incorrect) definition of network.
Something "bad" gets onto the network.
First of all, the tor network is for redirect of data transfer only, not for storage. This isn't a P2P kind of service. There's no FS involved. Files don't get onto the network, they pass through it.
The network has 100 nodes.
Secondly, the network has 100 dedicated server nodes, and god-knows how many clients. The servers are not necessarily the origin or destination of the packets in question... so... where does the roundup come in?
Unless you are implying that the government would have no qualms about rounding up a network of completely legal information redirecting nodes for the crime of potentially a client logging on to one of the servers, I'd say that you're wrong. And I'd also say that the government could not do such a thing. There's absolutely no legal precedent (IANAL) for that.
You may think its stupid, but unfortunately, its reality. The reality is that even though it slower, its still effective.
Here is an example of some log entries of spammers using Tor to forge referers and trackback spam to domains I host. Whatever tool they're using "broke" the url because they lowercased it (the url is valid, if the 'q' is uppercased).
At first I thought it was a new worm hitting us, but its coming too fast from far too many IPs in a very predictable pattern to be a random worm. The list of countries represented is very un-wormlike.
We survived 2 slashdottings 2 days in a row last week, barely a blip on our network radar, bu t a few days later, we were hit with this mountain of traffic from random locations, all within a 10-15 minute span, and only about an hour after I blocked the entire country of Brazil from reaching port 25 (the whole 200.0.0.0). Its definately maliscious, and definately intentional. I'm fending off attacks on our servers almost daily now, from netbios floods to SYN and TIME_WAIT attacks, to other things. I've been using the TARPIT module in iptables to slow things down, but they keep on coming, from thousands of unique IPs, across all range of our open ports (22, 53, 80, 2401, whatever).
So yes, Tor is most-definately being used to spam and DDoS sites, that is a fact and reality, which I can consistently prove with graphs, logs, and charts.
But it does serve a valid purpose, so I don't block the Tor IP range... yet.
And yet, here you are, posting this comment on Slashdot, which has a pretty effective mechanism for filtering out the crap. And your non-crap comment got a pretty good rating, too, so your freedom to publish is working out well here. Doesn't it seem that anonymity plus collaborative filtering gives you the best of both worlds?
It's a small price that allows others to express themselves more safely. You don't need to listen.
All it does is decrease the signal/noise ratio. You may have to work a little harder to find the good stuff, but you'll will find a way, or maybe an alternative. Reminds me of email filtering somehow. It is much harder when the sender doesn't have a stable identity. But, if all your legitimate senders have stable addresses, you can filter out the others. It also reminds me of seti, if you don't want to listen, you don't need to, there is probably someone more motivated than you.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest