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.)"
Something "bad" gets onto the network. Something that the authorities don't want out there.
The authorities find out.
The network has 100 nodes.
The authorities arrest the operators of all 100 nodes.
....profit?
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.
I'm sure dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships, who look forward to a way of publishing things that go against their governments without losing their heads, are happy to hear you're worried about IRC crapflooding...
That's the price of freedom: preserving it comes at a cost, something citizens in the America of the DHS should remember too one of these days, incidentally.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Aside from stuff like rape victims posting to support group boards with anonymity (one of the justifications people used for the old anon.penet.fi anonymizers) or protecting whistle blowers, I'm not getting the need for a public anonymizing network or how it will benefit us more than it hurts us.
What stops all sorts of jerks from trying to abuse it for spam, slander, harrassment, hacking, etc.? And if there are no safeguards, then how does the benefit of this outweigh the harm?
Seems to me like a bunch of geeks doing something because it can be done and worrying about the consequences later.
- Greg (who once used the anon.penet.fi server to post alt.personals ads from "Heddy", a disembodied head looking for people to chat with after the scientists left the lab for the night)
Start a happiness pandemic
That's just not true. The people involved with
shady websites are often (but not always) shady
themselves. You get a kid who's ego is tightly
wrapped up with, say, admining a board then there's
some spat and he's ousted. Now he doesn't have
anything better to do than DDOS the site and get
whatever satisfaction that can give him.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There are many questionable issues to deal with when you run a Tor server..
Child Pornography
I dont know if you are legally responsible, but do you want to help the anonomous distribution of child pornography, especially if the children are actually being harmed?
Terrorism
Networks like this would make it easy and untracable for terrorists to send their commuinications without being traced to a location. Do you want to be unwittingly helping Osama bin Laden send out messages and hide his location?
Spam
Do you want to be responsible for people who use Tor to spam (not just email, which I believe is blocked by default)?
This also applies to any other illegal activity.. Do you want to help people commit crimes?
then how do we know there are a hundred nodes?
Seriously, think about it for a moment: If it's completely anonymous, then how can we count the nodes. By counting a node, we now know where it is, virtually speaking, and can translate that into a physical location.
So either we don't know where all the nodes are, or this isn't really anonymous.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I have to disagree with this. The Internet, as it was invented, intended, and as it has been adopted ... none of these things ever included regulation. All efforts are being, and have been made to work around network problems.
The fact that the Internet exists doesn't translate to a need for the government or anyone else to guarantee that it operates without hiccups. I tire very easily of those that take the stance that the Internet and services based on the Internet should work flawlessly, and if needed, the network should be regulated to ensure that they do.
This kind of thinking is socialist in nature, and the Internet (as it is now defined) is totally antihtesis to this notion.
There is no current methodology for regulating a global phenomenon. No single government, despite their aspirations, can achieve regulation of a global network. Spam comes from every corner of the globe, and like fire ants, when you think you have eliminated it, it will show up from some other spot you have no control over.
Anonymity, or stealth on the Internet is part and parcel of what it is. Tracing someone's work over the Internet necessarily should be difficult. That people have made efforts to make it even more difficult is nothing more than living in the spirit of free flow of information without retribution.
While some of you might feel that this is not needed, there are disidents in some countries that really would like to have this kind of anonymity. Who are we to deny it to them on the basis of our view of the world?
Liberty and freedom only happens when you truly are free to say and do as you please (so long as you don't violate anyone else's freedom) and publishing what you think and feel is not against that. There are actual valid reasons for ultra privacy.
To say that netizens or Internet users should be responsible is to intimate that there is a set of regulations that they should abide by that is significant and pertains only to the Internet.
There are laws and social norms of decency that all should abide by whether they are on the Internet or in the local convenience store.
Sure, there will be those that abuse any leniencey, but there always is, no matter what the law or social morality says. Those that think there should be more regulation on the Internet might be better off staying off of the Internet... go get an AOL subscription... or something like that.
Just two cents worth
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I would like to provide a very profound example of the need for privacy: The U.S. Constitution. One of the biggest aids to getting the Constitution ratified in 1789 were the series of essays later entitled The Federalist Papers and although they were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, and others they were published under the pseudonyms Ceasar, Publius, amoung others. See: ClassicNote on The Federalist Papers.
The Federalist Papers are the single greatest interpretive source of the Constitution of the United States, the best insight and explanation of what the Founding Fathers purpose was in the passage of the document that governs the United States of America.
Supporting freedom of speech is not going to your local church on Sunday and hoopin' and hollerin' along with the priest, minister, rabbi, or whatever title they may possess. Supporting freedom of speech is seeing someone on their soap box spewing forth the most vile, soul wrenching diatribe you can imagine and while disagreeing with the message being given you still stand up and fight for their right to voice the opinion. Unfortunately many opposing points of view must be expressed anonymoously to avoid any repurcussions (like the no-fly list).
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
And screw the chinese. It amazes me how people still drag out this inflamed and rancid red herring every time there is a discussion of anonymity on the net.
Remember when it was SUPPOSED to be about freedom of speech? Yeah even when it's the "bad" kind. Look how they keep these kiddie porn pictures locked away where only a tiny few detectives and the pervs who obsessively seek out the images can find them. When they FINALLY admit defeat and roll out a few carefully altered pictures worldwide in an unprecedented "have you seen this place" (still cannot see the kid who probably could have been identified much quicker) they find out the guy was locked up and the girl has been safe now for YEARS!
How many years did she go on being abused because the friends and neighbors of this kid never had the chance to identify her?
Now, having said that let me remind you of something else: "child porn" is a moving target and especially in the US there is a VERY heavy footed march toward defining anyone under the age of 18 as a "child."
And the primary motivation for this is NOT to stop at "child porn" but to stamp out every modeling site and every ADULT porn publisher by overloading them and binding them with red tape and overzealous, politically correct "laws" brought about through uniting the most intrusive elements of the right wing religious nuts and the left wing feminist nuts. The door was thrown open decades ago when the court said "intent" was good enough for prosecution even in cases of pictures where no "harm" was done to the children and that was all about one thing: punishing people for beiung who they are and not punishing them for their actions.
I've said this before here and people go "oh they can';t get away with tat we have the supreme court" well yeah, it was the SCOTUS that sent down the first ruling and did so even in a much more liberal atmosphere, think of how that might go today. Better yet just look around, watch the news over the next few weeks and you will see it being played out right before you.
In germany magazines target at 13 to 15 year olds have frontal nudity and articles on buying condoms and giving head. They prepare kids for adulthood and recognize their right to their own bodies and their own sexuality. In the US and UK the political machination is moving in the exact opposite direction, seeking to strip away even adults from their inalienable liberty of self.
Just watch... you'll see soon enough.
1: political groups trying to hide from censorship
2: diplomatic/spy-agency messages
3: P2P
4: criminal/terrorist/pedophile activity
Number 1 is a sub-category of number 4, they should be grouped together. Hiding from government censorship is invariably a criminal offense.
Since people like to blame each other for anything these days, here's an interesting thought:
1. RIAA/MPAA starts to sue file-sharers, thus increasing the worldwide number of "criminals" by several million, while nobody asks for the reasons why filesharing is so popular and how to prevent people from "pirating" by, for example, lowering prices.
2. Millions of newly declared criminals need a way to protect themselves; they create anonymous P2P networks and/or participate in them. The decreased trust in the music/movie industry encourages piracy even more, so these networks get highly popular.
3. Real criminals profit from the anonymous networks.
So, in the end, why not blame the MPAA/RIAA for making terrorism and distribution of illegal pornography a lot easier?
But instead of trying to fight the reasons for IP-theft, they're just gonna respond with new laws that'll prohibit any form of anonymous communication, which will lead to even more criminal activity; more and more restrictive copy protections will be developed that won't be tolerated by customers who will refuse to buy it and download it instead. The response will be harder laws. It's a vicious circle that can only be broken by re-enforcing trust between the industry and their customers.
You're arguing freedom is worth any price, without considering what the word freedom means. Do the Chinese possess the human right to criticize their government freely, to talk to their fellow citizens without worrying about secret police, etc.? Absolutely so--and that the Chinese government insists on interfering with this human right is proof, in my book, that the Chinese government is illegitimate.
But we cannot buy human rights for people in China at the expense of the human rights of people in America or Europe. I have the exact same right to speak my mind freely, to make effective use of public forums to disseminate my ideas and my views. The original poster was remarking, quite correctly, that the total lack of accountability which Tor facilitates leads directly to a radical diminishment of his ability to effectively and freely communicate.
So you're saying that the right of Chinese dissidents to speak their minds freely is more important than my right to speak my mind freely? That I should be forced to endure a diminishment of my ability to express my views on the Internet, in order to ensure that Chinese dissidents can get their views out?
Congratulations: you're a character in a George Orwell book. The book is Animal Farm, and you're the character that tells the farm animals all pigs are created equal, just some of them more equal than others.
It is immoral to buy one person's freedom with another person's freedom.
The only moral way out of this which I can see is to devise protocols which guarantee everyone's freedom--the freedom of Chinese dissidents to criticize their government without the secret police knocking, and my freedom to have the Internet available for me to publish and disseminate my own information without dealing with a crapflood of spam.
Yes, the internet routes around damage. And information wants to be free. BUT, information does not want to molest people.
Most geeks don't want EBay to be constantly DDOS'd, and they don't want to be constantly spammed. And by all respects, we're making progress towards these goals. And these goals are NOT in conflict with the open design of the internet. Famously, the main underpinning of the internet is that all of the intelligence is at the endpoints, not in the center. As a result, it is difficult for governments to step in the middle of the internet and impose their will from a central place. However, there ARE places where intelligent decisions are made about whether information is passed on... at the endpoints.
If either end of a communication decides that the communication shouldn't take place (eg. if it's not consensual), then the communcation can and should be stopped. A free and open internet can simultaneously encourage the free-flow of information from individuals without government intrusion, and also inhibit the proliferation of spam and spyware. We only need to give individuals the tools to make more intelligent decisions about what kinds of data they accept, but in the end, it's up to every individual to make their own choices.
Spam and spyware are more about communicating false data to further their own goals than they are about freeing up information (eg. "here is the information you requested", "go ahead and download our nice P2P software... there's nothing undesirable hiding here"). Hopefully and fortunately, our philosophical underpinnings do not require us to tolerate such behavior.
I'm sure dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships, who look forward to a way of publishing things that go against their governments without losing their heads, are happy to hear you're worried about IRC crapflooding...
- IRC crapflooding is a form of DoS attack.
- DoS attack renders the forum to which they are applied practically useless (thus its name - Denial of Service).
- Practically any internet base publishing format is vulnerable to DoS attacks.
- Dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships won't be able to publish anything while their choice of publishing format has been rendered practically useless.
Tell me again, why should they not be worried about IRC crapflooding?
For the record: I don't really agree with GP, and I think Tor is a very good idea. I just want to point out that your logic is flawed (or non existant!).
May we live long and die out
If you're anonymous, than you're not speaking freely. Sure, it has it's place in allowing those who are in a position to provide a pointer to society in the direction of evil which may then be discovered when that person doing the pointing would othersie lose his privilege to said information by revealing his presence. Beyond that, it's counter productive in building liberty.
There are hundreds of methods for abusing cars as well. I could drive my car through a crowded flea market every Tuesday wearing sunglasses and using stolen license plates. That's both abusive and anonymous. But it's not a reason to take away cars. Or sunglasses. Or license plates. Or the screwdrivers used to steal and install license plates. Or flea markets. Neither is potential abuse a reason to take away anonymity.
Assume that no one can DoS the entire internet for a second. Thus, a censored people, prior to Tor, had no recourse of action to speak their mind safely. After Tor, they have a chance (remember, we assumed that no one can DoS the entire internet!).
I posit that, by stating that any forum a Chinese person would join would be DoSed, you made the assumption that the entire internet can be DoSed simultaneously, bringing the entire internet crashing down. Now doesn't that sound a bit silly?
5: Ordinary citizens who don't want their private information viewed/used against them either by hackers or by law enforcement personnel who abuse their power
The more law enforcement is simply trusted to do the right thing, the more you will have bad apples who don't. The phrase "power corrupts" describes a very real phenomenon.
Kythe
Im sure there will be plenty of complaints 'but its slow, it sux'.
Having a anonymous network or a fast one are mutually exclusive.
If you want to be anonymous you have to give up speed, its the trade off.
If you want speed, then you give anonymity up.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think that you are falling in to the trap of thinking that free speech means the ability to say anyting you like without repercussion. This is patently false the constitution gives you the ability to utilize free speech without fear of reprisal from the GOVERNMENT, it does not follow that it gives you the right to think that there will be no repercussion from your peers. In other words you may speak your mind, but be aware and take the consequences of your actions. Freedom is all about personal responsibility. The Federalist papers were written under pseudonyms because at the time there was no freedom of speech guarantee hence freedaom of speech becoming a cornerstone of the rights protected under the constitution.
That's not true, the professor in question has also made threats against those who people who disagree with him or came forward with unflattering evidence against. Such evidence includes plagiarism, falsification of credentials on his resume/application (claiming to be a native american when in fact he is not)...added to that is the fact he was granted tenure outside the normal tensure process (not his fault so much as CUs)--what he said and free speech are not the issue with the guy...that fact that he is a liar and a grifter is. Ward Churchill is the professor should anyone want to search what all the fuss is about.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Here's a typical firewall log of what happens when I post to SlashDot as AC:
Preserving your right to privacy.
As a friend once said, just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you can't hide it. It is still your nothing, not theirs.
Do I have to wear an ID tag at the mall with a uniform that never changes so I am always identifiable? Do I have to file an itinerary ahead of time and stick to it? No. In whatever street clothes I'm in for the day, wherever I go and whenever, I'm anonymous unless I tell someone who I am. None of their business.
Is there anything amazing in my e-mails to my family that I need to hide? Nope. Does this mean I don't have the right to hide them? Nope. My yard is boring and I have nothing to hide there. Do I tear down my fence? Nope. Do I sleep under the stars when camping instead of a tent just in case some agency wants to train their satellites on me? Do I stop wearing baseball caps and sunglasses? Nope.
Do I invite the public into my home and on my journeys to peruse everything I have and do? Nope. None of their business.
You may have nothing to hide, but it is still your nothing and if you allow the very ability to keep your own business private then you might as well move to the next step and keep a detailed by the second journal of everything you do, see, say, etc. and hand it over to the authorities, the news media, and the reality entertainment slime so you can report on yourself.
If we allow our fear of what criminals might do with a thing to instantly overpower any rational thoughts considering what we might do positively with the thing, then we might as well adopt a police state right here, right now because that is what we're asking for when we reject our own naturally existing human freedoms based on FUD.
If you'll excuse me, I have to IM and e-mail some people you don't know about subjects I'm not divulging to you through channels I don't feel like disclosing. I'm sure you'll probably be doing the same. If you don't tell me, that's just as anonymous and secretive as this system.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)