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?
Tor isn't designed to shield you from timing attacks (read the Tor website - they specifically disclaim this).
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.