Tor Named One of the Year's Best Products

Iorek writes "PC World lauds Tor, an anonymous Internet communication system, as better than its paid competitors, and one of the best 100 products of 2005. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is supporting Tor development, has a press release as well."

Comments

Such hypocrisy.

[King_of_Prussia]

How does slashdot get away with publicly lauding Tor as the great application that it is, while simultaneously blocking over 90% of the nodes from posting to slashdot? Try it now, it took me thirty tries to post a comment to slashdot using Tor the other day.

Re:Such hypocrisy.

[stormcoder]

I've complained repeatedly about this and I haven't gotten a response.

Onion routers are by no means new but Tor is

[Gopal.V]

Tor uses something called Onion Routing. But interestingly the original system was heavily patented and Tor had to work around all of those with something called "Telescopic Circuits". The problem (as far as my feeble brain understands) is that this is suitable for connection oriented data, but not for routing each packet a different way - seriously I'd love to run Tor as tun0 so that my IP packets head a different way and do point-to-point, but that seems to be a distant dream. Right now it seems to be just protocol proxying.

And the problem with onion routing is that it is neither high-bandwidth or low-latency - just anonymous. Sharing files over Tor is a blatant misuse - but tracker comm over it is perfectly valid (Azureus already has a plugin - though I like dht better).

Interestingly, I2P calls them Garlic routers (the pun is not lost on some of us).

Re:Hmm

[Motherfucking Shit]

These laws are passed for a reason; becuase they reflect community standards.

First, this is a blatant troll. For example, the Taliban forbade women from getting an education. Now that the Taliban have for the most part been defeated in Afghanistan, Afghani women are pursuing all sorts of educations, jobs, and are even walking around without burqas on their heads. If it was all about community standards, these women would never dare such things, lest the rest of the community notice and take action against them.

"Community standards" had nothing to do with it; the standards were set by a fairly small group of lunatics who happened to have a lot of guns. The same can be said of places like North Korea, Iraq, Sudan, and (dare I say it) perhaps even the United States. The FCC, backed by the federal government, which happens to have a lot more firepower than you or I, decides what is or isn't OK on television. As in several other above-listed states, the relatively small group with the superior firepower are the ones who set the rules, communities be damned.

Community standards are hogwash, anyway. I live in the deep south, the Bible belt. I know people who are staunch conservatives, or republicans, or Bush-Frist voters, or whatever you want to call them. These are the guys who go to that annual rally (I forget what it's called) where they profess their faith to God and their wives, and denounce pornography and infidelity. Yet I run into these guys at the strip clubs, at the liquor stores, you name it. All of the "sins" they're supposedly dead-set against, they more often than not participate in themselves.

Your average Bible-belter will vote against gambling, but then you'll find him in the casinos in Tunica or Biloxi. He'll vote against a state lottery, but darned if you don't run into him buying Powerball tickets at the gas station. He'll write to the FCC complaining about Janet Jackson, but as you drive past the adult bookstore, you see his car parked outside. He set the so-called "community standards" when he voted, but he doesn't even follow them himself. That's your average "community standards" progenitor.

Look no further than the Parents' Television Council for evidence of this. The PTC - which as you may recall from prior articles here is responsible for some 98% of all complaints to the FCC - proudly hosts on their own website the offensive clips from television shows they complain about. Even (gasp) children can surf by and find the stuff that's so offensive, they don't want their children to see it. How's that for irony?

For several months they hosted a video clip at http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/clips/WithoutaTrace_o rgy.wmv which was ranked #2 and #3 in Google on a search for "teen orgy party." (They removed it after I wrote to them about their hypocrisy, but you can still find references to its existence.) The trend is ongoing; for example, they're currently hosting the video of the Paris Hilton Carl's Jr. commercial which they describe as "extremely graphic and sexually explicit."

Earth to Parents Television Council, your website is fully accessible to any child who has internet access, why are you hosting "extremely graphic and sexually explicit" content there? Fucking hypocrites.

Who are you to advocate breaking them?

A human being who has tasted freedom, who knows about life without oppression, who understands the value of the right to read and speak freely, and who hates seeing women all covered up.

Same here.

[Jerk City Troll]

I was banned within hours of settiing up Tor on my host.

And Firefox is THE product of the year

[hey]

page 1

Tor is ok, but

[blue_adept]

if you want to surf anonymously without downloading and installing stuff, check out anonycat.

http://anonycat.com/

it's open source, so you can download and run it from your own computer if you want, but you can also just surfy anonymously from the main page.

it's pretty good for viewing slashdot, too, which you can't do with Tor.