Tor-Enabled Browser For the iPad, and Easy Tor Nodes on EC2

An anonymous reader writes "While there has been a port of Tor for jailbroken iOS devices for a long time, there was no way to use it if you did not want to lose your warranty. Now it looks like Apple has approved a Web browser for the iPad called Covert Browser, which includes a Tor client. If you look at the first screenshot on the author's page it looks like you can even select the Exit node. According to App Shopper it already hit place 64 in the iPad/Utilites category." And from another (of course) anonymous reader comes a link to CmdrTaco's take on another instance of Tor breaking into the world of "real users." As he notes, the Tor Cloud Project has posted simple instructions for installing EC2 Tor nodes using free-tier VMs (or paid nodes for roughly $30/month).

Comments

Many Tor nodes on one service - good idea?

[GameboyRMH]

Is it just me or does clustering a large number of Tor nodes in a small handful of commercial data centers sort of defeat the purpose when it comes to packet sniffing, anonymity (commercial service has physical + RAM access) and bypassing regional censorship?

If user A goes through Tor node B and exits at node C, and B and C are both hosted on EC2 where everything that happens on B and C could be secretly logged for all we know...A isn't very anonymous is he?

Re:Can you choose the exit node?

[GameboyRMH]

Oh yes:

http://slashdot.org/journal/269014/how-to-bring-the-cops-to-tor-exit-node-operators-doors-using-the-exit-feature

I2P doesn't allow this, and changes exit points more often.

Is Tor even viable anymore?

[kheldan]

I seriously question whether Tor is even a useful service anymore. Any government spook agency can start up a whole fleet of exit nodes, and mine the data they get through them, as can anyone else, really.

Re:Is Tor even viable anymore?

[GameboyRMH]

That's true for plaintext traffic, but if you use HTTPS with an anti-MITM plugin like Perspectives/Convergence, and assuming the government in question can't get free and easy access to the site's private key (big assumption, I know), then traffic sniffing isn't possible.

More importantly, it can make connections untraceable, and if you don't send any identifiable information through the connection, then it doesn't matter if the contents can be seen.

That said I think I2P is better both for darknet hosting and anonymization, it has a number of technical advantages over Tor.