Slashdot Mirror
Tor Usage More Than Doubles In August
hypnosec writes that the Tor network has witnessed a massive rise in the number of users connecting to it for the month of August.
"The privacy-enhancing network is known for providing an anonymous browsing experience through the use of a series of encrypted relays, and has had as many as 500k users throughout this year so far. But if we check the latest statistics available through Tor Metrics Portal there has been a whopping 100 percent increase in the number of Tor clients and as many as 1,200,000 users are connecting to the network. The previous peak for the network was in January 2012, when it saw as many as 950,000 users."
(a) Awareness of NSA surveillance has caused people to seek out TOR, or
(b) Increased awareness of TOR, thanks to the coverage of NSA surveillance, has caused people to try to evade said surveillance?
Maybe a percentage of that was FBI agents infiltrating The Silk Road?
Silence is a state of mime.
Tor: It's Not Just For Pedophiles Anymore!
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
This in fact means that the Tor network is in need of more relays and exit nodes. If you have access to a server that meets the requirements, you could consider it.
More Tor exit nodes is better. The NSA surely has many honeypot nodes, we need to drown them out with more legitimate exit nodes.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
http://www.kimmoa.se/Tor_summarized_for_mortals/
(c) Silk Road
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road_(marketplace)
The NSA are the ones that have pushed people to use TOR.
Isn't Tor unsecure if some adversary controls a large fraction of the network?
> "there has been a whopping 100 percent increase in the number of Tor clients
Half of them in those new, billion-dollar data centers, no doubt. Maybe they can't crack the traffic yet, but they could get relatively accurate dynamic topologies, and use their other, non-Tor nodes, also judiciously placed around in Internet backbones, to learn connections to individual computers.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Trying to stop Tor will be the next stage on the war on terror / porn / insert-what-ever-you-need-to-not-argue.
Following the NSA's example, other nations secret services are now rapidly deploying their own Tor honeypots.
I think the reporter is going out on too much of a limb. Let's just say that Mozilla might possibly contemplate considering thinking about perhaps incorporating Tor.
Could it be that torrent sites like the Pirate Bay are increasingly blocked around the world (including where I live in the UK) and people are using Tor to circumvent these restrictions?
During the US involvement in Viet Nam hundreds of thousands of people
engaged in protests. And that is exactly what needs to happen now.
But the sad truth is that most Americans are spineless idiots. The odds are
heavily in favor of the show going on as it is now, and there is nothing you
basement-dwelling nerds can do about it. Tough shit, pussies.
Thank you very much for paint a target on your forehead people, keep it up!
FBI Agent
It's precisely how the Internet has to evolve. Default anonymity.
Now someone puts this at the heart of the IP protocol.
Locallink addresses keep local and plain text or single layer TLS.
Everything that goes in or out gets Tor-ified. No escape, no exception.
Welcome to our new crypto clusterfuck overlord, game over NSA and friends.
I'm posting this from Tor.
Actually, I'm using a specialized Linux distribution with Tor built in for all communications. It's called Tails. Tails.boum.org to download it. Just burn the disc, and all communications through the live cd are sent through the Tor Network. It's probably the best thing going right now for privacy.
Tails.boum.org. It's seriously very easy and natural to just fire it up sometimes. Try, you might love having some privacy in your internet usage sometimes like I do. Go get it!
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/10/1519211/the-pirate-bay-launches-browser-to-evade-isp-blockades
That's why.
And how do we know this distro wasn't created by the NSA?
I'm a US citizen that's strongly opposed to all of this bullshit. I've lost my own patience for my government. What should people like me do to show people like you that we're just as fed up as you are, if not more?
Anything really, just do something, please...
:)
But may I ask, if you have:
- Donated to the EFF?
- Signed all applicable petitions? (optin.stopwatching.us, perhaps? and more...)
- Written a personal letter to your representatives?
Those things are the least you can do... as a concerned citizen it is probably you moral duty to do so...
These things don't really cost you anything, nor does it cost you anything to get your friends and family to do the same.
Many will tell you that these things don't change much, that is however not an excuse to skip them!
In fact writing you representatives is not something many people do, and doing does likely make a difference, even if they don't reply.
That said these things was just the least you could do. Next digging through a congressman's trash to find well trash, just kidding
But I'm sure there's lots of opportunities to volunteer and spend more than 5min stopping the crimes your country is committing... It's a worthy course.
If the entirety of human history is any indicator, the governed won't see any changes in a situation like this until they're willing to use lethal force against those who govern them.
Let's take at the history of nonviolent resistance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_resistance
:)
In fact, if you look at, it looks as if through the entirety of human history non-violent resistance is really in these days
(In fact, never before in the history of mankind have you as an individual ever been more empowered than now).
The increased usage increases the problem of bad throughput ... haven't used it in a while, but when I played around with it a bit, latency (which would be expected) but more importantly throughput was bad to unbearable ... more users require more performance at the exit nodes, which means more exit nodes are needed ... ... which, in turn, makes the whole network subject to other manipulation, and goes against the reason for the network ...
Having run an exit node for a short while myself, I know of the results: within less than 4 weeks, we received an inquiry into the owner/operator of the machine with the node's IP address, due to reported child porn access. Luckily, the police seemed to be halfway knowledgeable, and with the provided infos on the operation of the node (stats about the node throughput, etc.) they stopped investigating the issue. Needless to say node operation was terminated the day we received the initial inquiry. Without decent "provider status protection" for exit nodes, the risk for operators may be a bit too high unless extensive (and expensive) measures are taken to block illegal material
Have you audited EVERY line of code in Tails? No? And you trust it wholeheartedly because it's branded as 'secure'?
Unless you're on some random persons Internet connection, you aren't secure or anonymous.
So it appears there are more people using Tor. If the amount of traffic hasn't changed, than it's most likely a botnet. Does anyone know if the amount of traffic has spiked in correlation with the amount of "people" using Tor?
Tor is great to stop your neighbor from spying on your people-dressed-as-cows porn fetish, since it's trivial for someone who lives close to you to sniff your packets (a fact confirmed to me by my ISP btw). SO it's great for privacy from nosy ./ curious / thrill seeking neighbors or defending yourself against common cyber criminals. If you're hoping to position yourself AS a criminal using Tor, for-gheeda-bow-tit.
Just saying this so no one makes the youthful mistake of thinking they can, for instance, order molly from the silkroad and never have that fact traced back to them. Criminals are going to do what they do and Tor isn't going to protect them and that's between those people and law enforcement. What we don't want is young people whose brains and judgement aren't fully developed yet , but whose taste for adventure is, being caught in the meat-grinder of an incarceration-for-profit system complete with mandatory minimum sentences because they were severely misled on technical matters.
Do you know what the cost of owning (statistically , virtually) ALL of the exit nodes and most of the intermediate nodes of Tor is? It's effectively zero to the collective financial and technical resources of the "five eyes", that's what it is.
Oh but WoofyGoofy I use a VPN and encrypt everything !!!! And therefore what do you think follows? When you also own both ends of the connections and every major ISP etc etc How hard is it to attach unique identifying packets to your packets as they pass back into the network and then track them through it? Or a little Bayesian analysis based on just the time and size of your packets? Tor is based on the idea that most nodes are not pwned. That assumption is almost certainly false. Remember this also- law enforcement only needs a subpoena for your online activities and email if it's recent- 18 months. When the information you generated is older than that- and Google et.al. keep it FOR-EVAH-AH - that's forever to the phonically challenged- law enforcement can look at it without even so much as a warrant- just ask and ye shall receive, and yes, that includes the CONTENT of your emails etc. Look it up.
There are a lot of dangers to the total information awareness that's been set up. The one people focus in on is J Edgar Hoover style political repression.
Another one is that we're creating a generation of people who get caught for *absolutely* *every* transgression. Call them "generation busted".
People didn't evolve to be either perfectly compliant nor perfectly spied on all the time, everywhere and and norms of society didn't evolve with that as a fact either. Young people whose judgment is not in effect are a potential gold mine for people who make money off things like parole and incarceration and they will push to increase their revenue flow just like any other corporation would.
After all, who do you THINK lobbied for mandatory minimum sentencing? Who do you think pushes for three strike laws for what are basically non-violent offenders- stealing pizza, shit like that? This is a real danger.
I know one friend's son who is constantly in trouble with the law over shit like smoking ladies soap bubbles and petty shoplifting and such shit. Basically, it's like watching a lamb being fed to the wolves piece by piece. Soon enough he'll have enough of a record that they'll lock him up, making him permanently unemployable and then wait for him to commit a robbery or suchlike. It's sickening. The kid has severe mental health issues, probably was born that way and should be on some form of permanent public assistance. There exist people like that. It's cheaper than locking him up. Let him smoke dope, watch TV play games and just exist in whatever way makes sense to him. People are born who are just like this for reasons we don't understand, it's not anyone's fault, least of all his.
Just as bad is kids who are transgressive as a kind of experimentation, like, oh I don't know our coke snorting (he admits to it) President. Go to a
I'd say that one significant factor is the easy to install and use Tor Browser bundle with FIrefox.
Not all that long ago, setting up Tor was kind of laborious. Now, you can do it as easily as you install any other new piece of software.
And to be honest, I wasn't even keeping up with it enough to realize they'd put something like that out, until I read the recent news article revealing the govt. was finding out the source IP addresses of some Tor users thanks to a security vulnerability in the older version of Firefox the browser bundle was based on. (A problem since corrected.)
Speaking of SIlk Road -- have you ever actually looked around that site at any length?
After ignoring it for the longest time, I finally created an account there and took a good look at it, just to satisfy my curiosity.
What surprised me the most about it was the LACK of anything really exciting up there for sale! I mean, when you read the news hype and all the supposed angst from politicians and law enforcement over its existence, you expect the place to be a hotbed of sex slavery, child porn, virus/malware dealers, email spammers, and what-not.
In reality, I saw a fair number of people simply offering to exchange your bitcoin for US currency or bars of silver, a few people selling used electronics gear, and a lot of offers to sell information on how to supposedly do such things as hacking an ATM machine (reminds me of the old "G-Files" people passed around the local BBS's in the late 80's except those were free!).
Sure, there were some people offering to sell you pharmaceuticals and even small amounts of drugs like cocaine, but that's one category out of dozens - and there wasn't even a dramatic number of ads posted for them.
Mountain out of a molehill, all in all.
As many people have already stated, this is likely due to the revelation of the depth of NSA spying. The irony lies in the fact that the X-KEYSCORE software that the NSA uses to determine which traffic to log specifically targets Tor traffic. Therefore, these people are probably drawing more attention to themselves by using Tor than by not using it. That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if Tor guaranteed anonymity but based on the articles I've been reading lately, it seems like people with sufficient resources can defeat Tor's methods of anonymization.
Hey, August is Back to School month, duh. I mean, if you're going to be to college, you need to have your music and video all set.
It's great now that you can buy plug and play options to use Tor. Raspberry Pi + Tor = Easy
Have you ever looked around it at length?
There is not a 'small amount of drugs' but a whole shit load of them in varying quantity. 1g gram of pot to 1lb. Same goes with ectasy, shrooms, etc...For the most part you can find anything you want there and the amount.
If its a molehill, that hill is the staging area for the last battle on the war on drugs.
as far as child porn and sex slavery, silk road doesn't allow shit like that on there.
It's not a perfect solution, but the Tor Project's attempt to answer the problems faced by Tor with their Tor Browser bundle. Basically, it's a copy of Firefox tailored for Tor usage. It's set to use Tor by default. It also comes with HTTPS everywhere, an extension the EFF makes that redirects web traffic to use SSL when possible. Some websites don't support SSL and some don't implement it well, but it helps solve part of the problem with exit nodes being able to sniff traffic. Exit nodes can still see where that traffic is going but actually looking at contents is difficult. NoScript is installed and plugins are disabled to keep javascript and plugins from leaking your IP. StartPage is used as the default search engine rather than Google because StartPage doesn't log what users do and they are based outside of the USA.
Ideally, the increased attention the Tor Network is getting will result in more people volunteering their equipment and bandwidth to serve as exit nodes.
The Gospel according to lolcat
Unless there is some magic involved, many reading and/or posting to this story don't use Tor themselves while connecting to Slashdot.
When I enquired why, the response from a Slashdot spokeman was "We block Tor ips when we find them. We've just had too many problems with attacks and auto-posting trolls using Tor, sorry" (direct quote).
There was a recent story where they used malware to infect 80% of the people on TOR so they could trace them. It got mainstream coverage because it is the kind of makes law enforcement look good piece they like to push. Thus mainstream now knows about TOR.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2292298&cid=36647614
What if some botnet is using Tor. Maybe it has being rolled out in the last few days, weeks or months and is now being activated and communicating to it's c&c server over Tor? It would explain the massiveness and the suddenness. I don't believe this sudden rise can be explained ordinary people all using Tor at the same time.
The rise of TOR-based botnets
They only updated your telephone's and your laptops firmware so that it will be more comfortable. For them.
Just run a TOR exit node and perform tcpdump into a file. That makes for a nice additional outlook into the world. Lots of plaintext emails in my experience. And Jihadi websites. You might be able to hijack session cookies and do some stuff on them.
With the wonders of technology, everybody can be a spook.
They have been forced by DEGOV into adding a backdoor.
I do think I disagree. I am a kind of experienced Internet man (in many ways) and TOR does indeed help me tremendously. Lots of annoying people live at the other end of my DSL line and they can be defeated by TOR. So, I guess you are simply a hill.
Here is a new pgp (actually gpg) encryption program that makes it quite easy to encrypt/decrypt emails and other data:
GentleGPG: http://wjlanders.users.sourceforge.net/