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.)"
Normal web browsing is fine, albeit quite a bit slower than you're used to. Then again, that's the price of anonymity, I suppose.
As far as contributing, if I had the bandwidth to spare, I'd set up a Tor server and contribute. I do have Tor linked from my web site, though, for what that's worth.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
I'd be interested in seeing where this falls on the TOS of internet providers. I have a fat unmontiored (non-student) university pipe.... ;)
Also, the imageshack links aren't working...?
Can't post to slashdot using Tor, and a couple servers have been banned by slashdot entirely, for flooding the site.
Well sure, but sites that are likely targets of DDOS attacks tends to be larger, more commercial sites. Microsoft.com or Yahoo.com or Ebay or whoever CAN disallow Tor traffic (using blacklists) without really inconveniencing a significant portion of their users. And that's fine for me - why would I want to hide the fact that I'm downloading patches from MS? However if I'm looking at sites that may flag my IP with the CIA or FBI or whoever, it's likely that those sites will be fairly low on the list of likely DDOS targets. So it's not really and issue for me. Maybe others out there has different ideas of how they would like to use an anonymous browser, but I'm happy with what it is. In short: Meh.
Zero Knowledge systems made their anonymizng network pseudonymous instead of truly anonymous, and (here's the good part) you had to pay for a pseudonym.
If you acted like a jerk people would block you, your pseudonym would become useless, and replacing it would cost actual money.
I don't know how they avoided making the nyms traceable via the payment system. There is high magic in the crypto world that might have made it possible to break that linkage.
BTW I bow with respect toward your low user id.
The point of this post seems to be that TOR now has 100 verified nodes. But the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Routing that this points to says they had 100 nodes as of February 2005. Is TOR no longer growing, or is the math off somewhere?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
While I can see the need for people to be able to be "anonymous" online, I think there are more down- than upsides to this. As it is, I already feel that the internet suffers from too much anonimity rather than too little. There is no accountability and both law enforcement and ISP's are not interested enough in taking needed steps against abuse. When people can still DOS sites without consequences, flood newsgroups without as much as a slap on the wrist, and make death threats that get laughed off at by the police, I say that we need more responsibility and not more anonimity.
Particularly related to situations where my node ends up last in the chain for given http hits.
From a low enforcement point of view, I am accountable for any and all outbound http hits from my network.
At worst case, if my node does the actual http hits to sites like www.some-secret-kiddie-pr0n-site.com or www.some-phishing-victims-bank.com, then in all likelihood I'll be getting a visit from the police.
In such a case, there's no acceptable outcome:
If I encrypt my disks and refuse to hand over keys, I'm looking to do time for accessing the sites.
If I tell cops about the Tor node, and mount a 'plausible deniability' defense, there's the possibility of 'accessory' or 'contributory negligence/liability' charges.
Even if I beat all these charges and escape conviction, I still have to suffer:
- stress from police harassment
- time wasted in police interviews and court appearances
- loss of my PC for a year or more, while computer forensics cops go through my hard disks with a fine tooth comb
None of these outcomes are very appealing.Any thoughts on this?
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
1: political groups trying to hide from censorship
2: diplomatic/spy-agency messages
3: P2P
4: criminal/terrorist/pedophile activity
I think most people would agree that the great benefit of such a network is number 1. Number 2 is well accepted practice over the last 100 years, so I think there are not much objections against that. Number 3 might be the biggest selling point of this technique, allthough somewhat ethically debatable. I think this problem will be solved in the next 10 years by either the collapse of the content industry or the availibility of better alternatives. That leaves number 4. Is there anything that can be done against that or must this be seen as 'collateral damage'?
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
I use tor routinely. I'm using it right now. I have it on my laptop, too. It goes browser>privoxy>tor>website. There are only a tiny few sites where I go around this chain (slashdot here is one of them, but not the "affiliated" sites). Is it because I have something to hide?
Yeah, I do. Just like I put on pants before I leave the house, the same way I keep my money in a wallet and not on a chain around my neck.
I have a right to a reasonable expectation of privacy and this allows me to have some of that. When I am on my laptop on the filthy campus network I don't have to worry someone sitting across the hall with a packet sniffer on his laptop is eavesdropping on my browsing. And if I want to go haul in something off edonkey or even the evil mean and nasty freenet I can do so from anywhere on campus even behind the firewall that filters out all p2p traffic to the commons areas.
But to say people are going to use this to ddos sites is just stupid. Use the network before making such claims and see for yourself how it works. People who ddos sites don't need tor and wouldn't bother, it's too slow, too easy to trace via timing analysis, and the convenience factor alone means it will probably remain slow due to contantly being overloaded.
The people who ddos sites are going to run a scanner on a couple of irc servers, track down the same poorly configured and/or rooted out proxies all the script kiddies sharing movies and wanking in front of webcams are trying to hide behind, and set up a few chains with some decent bandwidth to stage an attack...
I've a friend, a Mac freak, who'se in Beijing on an intensive Chinese language course. I suggested he try tor out, expecting to have lots of hassles walking thru his first ever configure / make / install cycle. Eventually he tried it out & got it working without any help from me - just let me know he was using it, it was working fine, and to remind him to give a donation to the EFF (I'd mentioned making a donation myself a few weeks earlier.)
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Reminds me of the girl who was arrested for possession and distribution of kiddie porn with pictures of herself.
Please explain to me again how throwing a teenage girl in jail, and making her become a registered sex offender for the rest of her life, does something positive and helps her.
How can somebody be both the victim and the abuser?
I've been using tor for about six months now; not for all browsing, but for times when I want to be anonymous. It is a bit slower, but I personally value my anonymity for certain things. As someone below has pointed out, it's like leaving the house without wearing trousers.
:-)
I've been running a verified server node for the last couple of months- it's a good way to give back to the community. It's really easy to set up and makes you feel good
Note you don't need to verify your node- you can just run it anyway. I didn't verify it until I received a nice friendly email from the EFF/tor people asking if I would register - from a human - and I did.
The more tor routers there are, the faster the service may become.
http://blog.grcm.net/
I am usually all for anything the EFF does, but...
As an op, I've had to ban parts of tor because a lot of flooding, spamming, etc comes from that domain. Despite the EFF's push to create an "anonymous haven" it's basically turned into a thieves paradise which allows one to carry out attacks without fear of being detected.
Later, GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Wikipedia is currently blocking many Tor server IPs from writing (reading still works), because they haven't figured out internally how to deal with the fact that they want to provide open access but they also have no ways to control abuse to their website. We're working with them to resolve this.