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?
Can't post to slashdot using Tor, and a couple servers have been banned by slashdot entirely, for flooding the site.
Tor isn't designed to shield you from timing attacks (read the Tor website - they specifically disclaim this).
Terrorism Networks like this would make it easy and untracable for terrorists to send their commuinications without being traced to a location.
Do you not want to help civil rights campaigners in China defeat political suppression? Do you not want to help the Iraqi people fight against American terrorism and get their country back from the evil empire?
Yes anonymous internet use should be banned. Thank you for your insightful post Mr. Coward.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
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...
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.
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
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
Your ability to speak your mind freely is not impeded by a flood of spam and crap posts. Your ability to find the information you want, and the ability of other users to find the (presumably valuable) information you have provided, is indeed impeded -- but, while self-expression is a fundamental right, the `right to be heard' is not. If the price of a Chinese citizen's right to criticise his government was that I could no longer criticise mine (which, as an American, I increasingly am not allowed to do anyway), then that would be an illegitimate trade-off; but surely if the price of that same right is that I have to sort through a few (or very many) more messages to get to the ones I want, then it is selfish in the extreme to claim that the price is too high for me to pay. It is not that a Chinese citizen is `more equal' than I, only that a huge benefit accrues for a relatively small price.