Posted by
timothy
on from the blender-seems-the-obvious-choice dept.
jaromil writes "TorTV is an early effort to embed Tor in household computing: run it on your TV at home. So far only WDTV installed with the homebrew WDLXTV firmware is supported. What other platforms do you think are viable for it?"
OK, let's get the obvious question out of the way: Why would I want to run Tor on my TV? Honestly, I don't get why. I don't see anywhere on the site that explains why it would be a good thing for me to run my TV on the Tor network.
Re:Huh?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, there is the, "Because I can" factor. But it also could provide some interesting safety measures when using a built-in browser on some televisions. Yes, there are televisions with a web browser. Why? Because some people like the idea.
Some TV's come with Netflix and (as mentioned by another user) web browsers. A lot of content out there is limited to specific countries; for example most Canadian TV networks (comedy network, space, etc) have TV shows available for viewing but locked to Canadian IPs; likewise for American networks and American IPs. Netflix, Amazon, etc, all do the same. If you could choose an exit node in any given country, you'd effectively have a nice proxy for these geographically locked services.
Even so, of all the computers in your house, this is the oddest choice for using as a router. Why not.. um.. your router?
To take some of the load off your other hardware maybe. Though the router is where a LOT of things would make more sense to run if you could - bittorrent for example. no needing to deal with one computer on your network trying to bury your router with connections.
-- I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
No, my router routes. The closest thing to a service that it provides is NAT. I don't worry about it getting buried in connections because I bought a router (Cisco 881 at a surplus yard) that would stand up to the abuse I throw at it.
Speaking of WDTV...
by
LanMan04
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I just grabbed the newest version, the WDTV Live Streaming Server "Gen 3", which is essentially the "Hub" product without the internal hard drive.
Will WDXLTV be available for this model ever? If so, do I really care? It plays *everything* I throw at it...so what else does XL do, other than being a torrent/usenet client?
I'm putting this under the "toaster" comment not only because of the traditional usage of "toaster" to refer to any small machine (there have been actual toasters running NetBSD for years...) but because you might alternatively want to put Raspberry PopTarts in your toaster, and I need to make it clear that you shouldn't put Raspberry Pi in your toaster, even if it is RoHS-compliant.
But a Raspberry Pi computer is designed to attach to your TV, works fine with TVs that don't already have web-toasters built in, is something you can take to random hotels with randomly-filtered ISP service, doesn't cost much, and should have enough horsepower to run Tor. It may not have enough storage for some of the classic applications for Tor-on-a-TV, such as downloading pirated movies, but maybe a USB disk drive can fix that.
--
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I don't know...
by
TubeSteak
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As a result of inexperienced police departments, running a TOR exit node can have some serious consequences. So the idea of ubiquitous TOR is great, but in practice I'm be leary of endorsing having TOR enabled [everything]. For now, it should remain the domain of experienced users who are running TOR with their eyes open.
You can say it's a chicken or egg kind of situation, but I don't want my family to be one of the eggs that gets broken because of the content coming out of their TOR exit node.
What's All This About, Then?
by
Karl+Cocknozzle
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Is the goal to flood the Tor network with so much traffic that the feds might not be able to catch your bittorrent downloads?
-- Who did what now?
Re:What's All This About, Then?
by
jc79
·
· Score: 2
1. Malicious exit nodes can correlate your BT streams to your Tor web browsing, and learn your real IP.
How exactly can they do this? Why would your web browsing have any correlation to your BT streams?
Sorry, should have been more clear. Because Tor conserves circuits for reasons of efficiency, it is possible for an exit node to build a profile of the activity of a circuit by inspecting the data leaving that circuit. If you are browsing via Tor while running a BT session, the data from the two sessions can be sent over the same circuit. The exit node can learn your IP from the BT stream (BT client tells tracker what unique random port it's listening on, exit node sees connection to tracker at unique port number, faulty BT client sends IP to tracker) and correlate that to the web traffic on the same circuit. They now know what you're browsing, and what your IP is. Anonymity broken. It's explained in the post I linked to.
Like you say, if your BT client doesn't know its real IP (NAT etc), then you're OK. It's a question of all the lemons lining up.
Assuming you don't want to actually download anything. What is actually available on I2P? How does its library compare with any of the trackers on the internet at large? The reason people use tor isn't because it is more secure, but because it lets you browse the internet that you already use.
Chicken and egg problem. If more people used I2P for their filesharing, then there would be more files available over I2P. A few benevolent individuals are seeding more and more. But yes, I understand that people prefer to proxy their normal things over Tor rather than switch entirely to new networks. It's just a shame that in doing so they hurt the Tor network.
There was a suggestion a while ago that someone ought to make a bitTORrent client which ran a Tor relay on every BT peer. This would solve the bandwidth problem. Don't know if any work was ever done on it.
Yeah, but when you combine it with blatant trolling, it's a pretty good guess that you're not dealing with an oppressed political dissident or a whistle-blower, just a douchebag manifesting the GIFT.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, let's get the obvious question out of the way: Why would I want to run Tor on my TV? Honestly, I don't get why. I don't see anywhere on the site that explains why it would be a good thing for me to run my TV on the Tor network.
I just grabbed the newest version, the WDTV Live Streaming Server "Gen 3", which is essentially the "Hub" product without the internal hard drive.
Will WDXLTV be available for this model ever? If so, do I really care? It plays *everything* I throw at it...so what else does XL do, other than being a torrent/usenet client?
With the first link, the chain is forged.
What the hell are you two talking about? Shaun's fit roommate got bit early in the movie, and the fat one made it to the end.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
I'm putting this under the "toaster" comment not only because of the traditional usage of "toaster" to refer to any small machine (there have been actual toasters running NetBSD for years...) but because you might alternatively want to put Raspberry PopTarts in your toaster, and I need to make it clear that you shouldn't put Raspberry Pi in your toaster, even if it is RoHS-compliant.
But a Raspberry Pi computer is designed to attach to your TV, works fine with TVs that don't already have web-toasters built in, is something you can take to random hotels with randomly-filtered ISP service, doesn't cost much, and should have enough horsepower to run Tor. It may not have enough storage for some of the classic applications for Tor-on-a-TV, such as downloading pirated movies, but maybe a USB disk drive can fix that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As a result of inexperienced police departments, running a TOR exit node can have some serious consequences.
So the idea of ubiquitous TOR is great, but in practice I'm be leary of endorsing having TOR enabled [everything].
For now, it should remain the domain of experienced users who are running TOR with their eyes open.
You can say it's a chicken or egg kind of situation, but I don't want my family to be one of the eggs that gets broken because of the content coming out of their TOR exit node.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Is the goal to flood the Tor network with so much traffic that the feds might not be able to catch your bittorrent downloads?
Who did what now?
Yeah, but when you combine it with blatant trolling, it's a pretty good guess that you're not dealing with an oppressed political dissident or a whistle-blower, just a douchebag manifesting the GIFT.