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How Tor Helps Both Dissidents and the Police
Al writes "Technology Review has a in-depth article about the anonymous networking software Tor and how it is helping dissidents spread information in oppressive regimes such as Syria, Zimbabwe and Mauritania, and opening up the unfiltered web for users in many more countries. In China, for instance, the computers found in some web cafes are configured to use Tor automatically. Interestingly, some police agencies even use the software to hide their activity from suspects. As filtering becomes ever more common in democratic countries such as the US, perhaps Tor (and similar tools such as I2P), will become even more valuable."
It cuts both ways.
You can use a knife for cooking, mugging or for police action.
But the more problematic criminals are also the ones that are most likely to be aware of this and be careful with what and who they trust.
And the most careful persons in organized crime have sometimes only been relying on trusted messengers that have been doing all their communication. That to avoid wiretaps.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Or Patriots? I thought only terrorists needed to hide their conversations?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Ok, where and when in the US did filtering become 'common'??
I'm hearing about it becoming common in other western countries...and am afraid it will happen here, but, I'm not aware of it being common here?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I'm starting to see less and less of a difference between the police and the criminals.
I would really like projects like Tor, and I2P to get more support. Even the United States has problems with net filtering and network shaping. The more the telcos and government try to regulate the internet, the more people will turn to projects like these. Like trying to firmly grasp water in your hands.
-Chris
I'd like to see a discussion of the legal ramifications of letting your system be used as a Tor relay. Suppose I volunteer some of my home network capacity to Tor.
Putting aside the fact that it's probably a violation of my broadband provider's agreement to share my connection in this way, what if someone uses Tor for kiddie porn and happens to make the final connection to the police honeypot (so to speak) from my IP address?
If anyone can point to a good discussion of this, it would be great. I'd like to let my system be a relay for Tor, but the risk seems large.
But what about the Catholic priests? Do you believe that criminal investigations should be allowed to go forward if there is sufficient evidence to charge the person who allegedly committed the crime, even though they can buy off the victim(s)?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've recently resorted to using P2P again to download TV shows which will never be released on DVD, ostensibly due to soundtrack/royalty issues. Some of them HAVE been released with butchered soundtracks, which is stupid. Some of the shows are from the 70s and the copyrights ought to have expired a couple of years ago but sadly because of lobbyists' hands filling congress's pockets, it's not the case any more.
So, to get what the media producers refuse to sell, I download - and my downloads are near-untrackable thanks to tor.
I would seed. Really I would, however, the MPAA and RIAA are too fucking sue-happy to acknowledge that the only reason I have turned to P2P is because in many cases the product is not otherwise available, and in other cases, the "legitimate" product offering is of inferior quality.
I also plan to download the original, unmolested version of E.T. if I can find a Laser-Disc rip. I refuse to purchase the politically-correct DVD release where guns have been replaced with walkie-talkies and where elliot probably doesn't call his brother penis-breath, and where they're not dressed up as arab terrorists.
Policemen eat food, and so do criminals! In a shocking discovery today we learned that a completely ambivalent object such as food could be used for good and for evil. Some fringe elements speculate that food in fact has no innate bias towards good or evil, and in fact does not exert any influence over the person that uses it apart from keeping them alive. But we all know that since it's rumored that TERRORISTS (tm) have been known to occasionally eat, food is obviously evil and should be banned. The fact that law enforcement officers have been spotted eating once in a while (especially in the vicinity of doughnut shops) should not allow us to forget about this lurking evil we call food. In fact, the world would be a better place if it were banned entirely.
Warning! If you are sarcasm impaired, the above paragraph may cause you to become angry. Breathe slowly and try to relax. If you cannot relax after a few minutes, you might need professional help. Sarcasm may be the lowest form of wit, but it is wit nonetheless.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The NSA has been known to operate a few Tor nodes.
Tor is a neat idea, but you may rest assured that a broad cross-section of malicious organizations and curious agencies are running Tor nodes (especially exit nodes) for the express purpose of traffic analysis and eavesdropping.
I know Tor and many other services that make your traffic anonymous require more bandwidth then normal network traffic. I find it interesting because one of the really pushes for packet inspection is to reduce bandwidth consumption.
I always wondered whether it is not possible to attack TOR with statistical analysis provided you can dedicate significant resources to it. Suppose you are a big brother-style government agency with many computers and bandwith pipes dedicated to your goals. Could you not register a significant amounts of output and intermediate nodes (like say 10% of all nodes) that are specially improved to cooperatively log output HTTP traffic along with various web services session cookies, headers and originating IP addresses in a centralized DB and then use statistical analysis to identify the candidate source IP addresses of suspicious HTTP traffic?
iran, egypt, cuba, china: everything you do is spied upon. if you say something against the party or the religion, you are brutally punished
western democracies: right wing politicians put forth timid legislation weakly attempting to curtail something everyone agrees is truly evil, like child pornography. opponents vociferously shout the retarded legislation down
these are somehow equivalent scenarios in some people's minds. as if the mere existence of idiot social conservatives in western countries is equivalent to them being in absolute power, as they are in other parts of the world where real censorship exists
the irony of course is that the vociferous opposition that so many of the west enjoy, like right here on slashdot, is grounds for being imprisoned in real censorship countries. well, if we are the equivalent of such truly censorsing countires, why aren't you in jail? why do you feel so free to call whatever politician you dislike a complete asshole?
when and if you have real reason to fear calling obama a poopy head or gw bush a moron, then we have arrived at equivalent censorship status quos. until such time, stop being a hysterical twit and show the slightest bit of intellectual honesty and admit some places have it a hell of whole lot worse off than western countries in terms of freedom of expression
and when i say "hell of a lot worse" i know for some of you this is grounds to continuing criticizing the west on this issue. as if it is more important to somehow pursue impossible to achieve perfection in the west than it is important to fight truly egregious conditions elsewhere
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That's why it exists, to steal all muh shit !!
do you mean if you witness a crime you shouldn't report it?
please clarify your position, because "stop snitching" only guarantees your community is going to become a criminally infested hell, complete with brutal and corrupt police
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
how it is helping dissidents spread information in oppressive regimes such as Syria, Zimbabwe, Mauritania,
And California.
There's your problem. You can't by definition be censorship resistant and censor at the same time. So unfortunately or not, censorship is an all-or-nothing proposition.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
did your parents lock you in basement, and occasionally throw tablescraps down the stairs?
what dystopian asocial reality do you think this advice serves?
let's put it this way: say you are 100% correct in your assessment. then we agree that this reality is wrong, and needs to be corrected. then the question is, how do we correct it? and the answer is, citizens begin to hold the police accountable for their actions, so a regular and normal human sense of respnsibility and accountability can be upheld again
in this manner, we begin to realize that your attitude only serves to perpetuate and extend the evil police habits you despise
you're a victim, a codependent. stop using your retarded rationalizations as a crutch and start expecting some accountability and responsibility from your police, and you'll actually get it
which you mostly do get already, assuming you live a western democracy
where do you get this bullshit? hollywood movies? do you live in an egyptian or a brazilian favella?
most probably, you are some posturing upper middle class suburban poser
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As filtering becomes ever more common in democratic countries such as the US [...]
I'm wondering for a long time, if you really still can call the US and many other (eg European) states "democratic".
I mean, has the choice between two variants of the same shit still the right to call itself this?
I'm very lucky, that things like Tor, and research around it, still exist. It might soon be our only chance of freeing ourselves from a regime of total control.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
let us imagine for a moment you live in a world where the police are completely reponsible and accountable. how are they supposed to successfully keep YOUR community free of crime with a citizen so mindlessly hostile to their basic function?
your entire mentality ensures your community is a crime infested hellhole. enjoy it. you created it. no, not the police, the police serve you, they are your servants. you use them to keep your community crime free. if you instead you imagine them to be mindless jail-stuffing goons you must avoid at all cost, you get nothing but criminals walking away scott free from crime. i hope you don't live near me, because your mentality enables crime
now let's imagine that the police do fall short of good accountability and responsibility. how do you bring them up a notch? and the answer is, citizens begin to hold the police accountable for their actions, so a regular and normal human sense of respnsibility and accountability can be upheld again
in this manner, we begin to realize that your attitude only serves to perpetuate and extend the evil police habits you despise
you're a codependent. you create your own victimhood. stop using your retarded rationalizations as a crutch and start expecting some accountability and responsibility from your police, and you'll actually get it. start with the assumption they are corrupt, and you will get a community chock-a-block with criminals, since you have guaranteed they go unpunished since you won't cooperate with their removal. start with the assumption they aren't corrupt, and when the polcie do fall short, bring it to the attention fo the press, the judiciary, and you get justice if you live a just society
did your parents lock you in basement, and occasionally throw tablescraps down the stairs? what dystopian asocial reality do you think your low iq advice serves? assuming you live a western democracy, you can fix your police. really, moron
where do you get your bullshit attitude? hollywood movies? do you live in an egyptian or a brazilian favella?
most probably, you are some posturing upper middle class suburban poser
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Tor is far overrated. I'm surprised it has any notoriety. Last time I used it, which was a few months ago for a research project, it was quite easy to set your self up as an exit router and capture clear text information for mail, telnet, ftp, etc. It only protects to the extent of the knowledge of the user (like most systems/programs/features). Frankly if your not encrypted end to end and only using IP addresses I would avoid it completely. The added latency of around 19 seconds for just google.com to load from the word go makes it suck even more, however that is not a Tor issue directly, that is from people loading down the network with p2p traffic. In summary, use only if encrypted end to end and no DNS is utilized, to protect yourself....and order a latte, because your going to be there a while. Don't believe me? Look at some of the research the Uni of Colorado and Washington have done. Mine was based on their great work.
Yes. The difference is criminal vs civil.
I have thought for some time that privacy is the next killer app. The person who solves the privacy problem will make a stack of money.
of idiots hyperfocused on western domestic "crimes" while the taliban takes over nuclear pakistan
but of course, this is no reason to focus your criticisms outside the west, right? because what goes on in pakistan is after all totally the west's fault
(smacks forehead)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"... there's no way in hell you could EVER know what the entire body of law"
This is where jury nullification comes in. But they don't like that much either!
When you're a small company, you have limited resources. You can't easily build a vast network to come from different IPs every other second so a "smart" infector doesn't give you another sample to play with when you already came a moment ago.
TOR solves this by offering you a new IP every couple seconds. As a neat side effect, it means that anyone coming through that same TOR exit node won't be infected because the infector thinks its deed has already been done.
When you're talking with people, it's sometimes not too beneficial if they trace back and notice that your IP belongs to a very similar subnet as some company that pissed them off by nullifying their latest trojan before it got out.
TOR solves this too.
The alternative would cost a fair lot of money. And is anything but a surefire way to avoid the wrath of those whose business you disturb.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Sounds painful.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
How is Syria an oppressing regime?
Okay, so this thread is entirely off-topic, but I'll reply here. I am Catholic, and I do wish the government would prosecute these men as criminals. Money might give the alleged victims a sense that they are okay, but it doesn't take a dangerous person off the streets. I have found the Church's solution of simply moving the priests to another location in many of these cases to be disappointing to say the very, very least.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
admit some places have it a hell of whole lot worse off than western countries
So as long as we're better than the worst, we should never complain. So the person with the worst behavior in the world has set the bar for all of humanity--no one can work to change any behavior as long as it's not the absolute worst.
Looks like we have to work in serial, dealing with the one worst individual at a time, getting him to not be worst anymore then going to the next worst, until we get to everyone. What a GREAT PLAN!
a giant lake
what would al qaeda and its sympathizers do? celebrate and become pastoral sheep farmers?
no, they would go right on with their murderous agenda, because it is not centered on the usa. it is an agenda wholly of their own creation based on their own retarded interpretation of otherwise valuable and sacred texts, used to justify a fascist fanaticism not seen since nazi germany. is nazi germany chamberlain's fault? chamberlain certainly fucked up in his dealings with hitler, big time. and his share of the blame for nazi germany's existence?: 0%
furthermore, if the usa had handled their dealings with al qaeda 1,000x worse than it already has, it would not in any way mean the usa shares any culpability for al qaeda's actions. and if the usa had dealt with al qaeda 1,000x better, people like you would still be hyperfocused on the west, because your mind is ossified. all you know is obsessive kneejerk hypercriticism of the usa. its as if your mind can't even perceive of other players in the world capable of their own independent behavior. everyone in the world, in your mind, is some derivative of an american action. your thinking is more usa-centered and ethnocentric than that of a blatantly ultranationalist neocon!
when al qaeda or a sympathiser does something evil in the world, the blame falls to... drum roll please... al qaeda and its sympathizers. can you believe that! i know, really wacky far out thinking there, i'm really quite radical in my groundbreaking hypothesis (snicker)
you can't understand that your criticism should be pointed at them. maybe if you learned to udnerstand there are other players in the world than the usa, that don't take their orders via backdoor cia mind control devices a la a retarded b-grade hollywood movie, or via incredibly convoluted and creative thinking that harkens back to cold war crimes from a half a century ago, maybe then you'd actually be some of use to the subject matter you involve yourself in
you're kneejerk thinking is tired. give it up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it