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.

Re:Such hypocrisy.

[Tim C]

If they allowed 100% of the Tor connections, the comments would be flooded with more ascii goatse pics, GNAA Postings, tubgirl links, and all kinds of wonderful trollish crap.

That's what the moderation system is designed in part to deal with. (Of course, with the addition of friends and freaks, and score modifiers for them, it's turned into more of a way of ensuring that your world view is never disturbed by reading things you don't agree with, but I digress...)

There's also nothing stopping the editors from deleting such crap. The ASCII pics and GNAA posts are easily seen at a glance, and it'd be trivial to produce a private interface that had a "delete this shite" button against each comment (or checkbox and single "Delete the shite" button, or whatever)

I'm all for internet anonymity and free speech, but there are very few reasons why someone would need to visit the slashdot comments section with a proxy.

Corporate whistle blowers, people in countries with oppresive regimes commenting on stories about some aspect of that regime (eg net censorship in China), people discussing first-hand experience of illegal activities, etc. No, it doesn't happen very often, but when it does it could potentially lead to very interesting comments.

All of that is beside the point, however. It most certainly does seem rather odd that the Slashdot editors praise Tor while simultaneously seeking to prevent access to the site with it. It's effectively saying "Yes, annonymous internet access is necessary and good, but not to *my* site!"

So, what, other sites should allow it, but not /.? "Do as I say, not as I do"? If you want to convince people that something is good, allowing it yourself is generally seen as a necessary first step.

Publicity a good thing or not?

[Critical_]

I have been a Tor users for a very long time and, to a certain extent, the fact that it is not very well publicized has kept the system relatively free of the possibilty abuse. When I say possibility of abuse, I am talking about the media saying that Tor is a way to do anonymous torrents of copyrighted material, transferring child porn, etc. As Tor becomes more publicized, will I have to deal with articles from self-proclaimed experts accusing Tor of being a vehicle for such activity? Will I then see some politician try to pass legislation against anonymizer type software? Maybe I'm being alarmist, but these days anything is possible.

Re:Hmm

[kingofalaska]

Scroll down, read the articles about the so-called "Patriot Act", or censorship, or...

There are many reasons. Yes, it can be abused, just as a stick or a rock can be abused.

KOA

Giant Missile Defense Radar Sails

Re:Hmm

[stevey]

I don't get why so many people put letters in envelopes, what have they got to hide?

Why not write on the back of postcards so everybody can make sure they're not hiding illegal words..

It's a slippery slope. Encryption is useful.

Re:Hmm

[Dr Damage I]

The fact that one does not wish the state or ones ISP to know ones secrets does not imply that those secrets are illicit in nature. A person could be transmitting commercially sensitive material which if released could be used by ones competitors, or one could simply be averse to having people know that one uses ordinary, legal porn.

It's a simple fact that People like privacy and place a non zero value on it. The phrase "what are you trying to hide" is the last refuge of the voyeur.

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).

Huh?

[poptones]

I don't understand why you would need tor to hit here. Just put slashdot on the "exception list" in your proxy config and it works great. The ads still get killed (if you are using privoxy) but the content is fast and complete.

You might also trying setting up your tor config file. You do not HAVE to use the "trusted gateways" for the final drop, that is only how it is configured OOTB. Add "exit" to the untrusted gateway nodes permissions - heck you can even remove "exit" from the "trusted nodes" permissions. Now you're not connecting via those "known tor nodes."

BTW it ain't just slashdot. Lots of sites still use IP information instead of session variables and it will drive you nuts trying to post to one of them or even stay connected without having to log in again every two minutes. Simple solution is to just add those sites to the "don't proxy these sites" list. May not be the solution you want if it's a "controversial" site that could lead to leagal attention, but if you're really worried about that sort of thing you're a fool for using tor for it anyway.

Re:Hmm

[Motherfucking Shit]

The thing I don't get with Tor is why someone would need that much encryption, unless they were transferring something illegal like copyrighted material.

In some places, discussing things like "democracy" and "freedom" is illegal. In some places, it's verboten for women to bare their necks or ankles (much less anything else) in public. In some places, it's illegal to read books that involve sexual behavior, or criticize the government, or any number of other things.

Are you still convinced that a network of potential "illegal" uses is such a bad thing?

Tor like to thank the Academy

[jalefkowit]

Tor very happy to win award. Make Tor happy. Tor not smash now.

Re:How about...

[caluml]

Slashdot either eliminate "Anonymous Coward" posting

No - it should leave the ability to post anonymously, but only if you are logged in to an actual account.

Re:Tor is ok, but

[ldd23]

That's not exactly anonymous. The anonycat server knows your IP address and what page you're browsing. The whole point of the TOR, I2P, etc. anonymizing network systems is that no other entity on the network can determine both your IP address and what content on the network you're using.