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Tor Now Comes In a Box
Daniel_Stuckey writes "Tor has been in the spotlight lately as a way to keep prying eyes away from your online activities. However, to your average internet user, the covert network of relays and whatchamacallits can come off as too complex and intimidating to bother with — even as people are increasingly concerned with their online privacy in light of the NSA scandal. So goes the thinking behind Safeplug, a new hardware adapter that basically puts Tor in a box. It takes 60 seconds and 50 bucks to plug the privacy box into your router, and you're good to go, the company claims. Like anonymous browsing for dummies. The adapter comes from hardware company Pogoplug, which announced its new product yesterday and hopes it will bring Tor to the mass market by offering more consumer-friendly access. 'We want to just take what is currently available today to a more technical crowd and democratize it, making it easier to use for an average user,' CEO Dan Putterman told GigaOM."
Have you installed TOR on a winders box recently? It is not complicated and certainly does not need a geek to help you.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
We now turn to Admiral Ackbar who I believe has a comment on this development....
Wireless Tor AP built with a Raspberry Pi: http://learn.adafruit.com/onion-pi/overview
Yeah, fuck those Dems for making TOR so hard to install!
Oh, I mean, wait... What the fuck are you on about?
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
i like the idea of a $50 plug and play box for tor, but how is this different than using a browser plugin? a serious question, not being rhetorical.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Just use SelekTOR for easy tor exit node selection and as a nice little byproduct use the media patterns to access UK TV online, get to see the Dr Who anniversary when the Brits do, see here http://www.dazzleships.net/?page_id=71 for download and other info.
Color me skeptical.
It's untinkable that the Mighty Tor could be trust into a box such as tis.
It isn't nice to refer to her as a "box". I hope he's using a condom.
today is spelling optional day.
Their other products phone home because they are really in the business of selling online services, not network hardware.
Obama!
Yea, but this one doesn't phone home.Thanks to a "National Security Letter" it phones directly to the NSA. Not that it maters, since the NSA is closely monitoring all of the TOR portals anyway.
Security Theater, it's not just for airports anymore.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
But we're going to need a lot more tor nodes, particularly exit nodes
Its my Tor in a box.
Yes, I speak English, the problem is that I do not understand all that bollox.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
I honestly didn't know people still used Tor.
Last I tried it, it necessarily slowed my Net connection down to essentially unusable because of an obvious lack of "exit nodes". Besides, all it does is add some very, very simple obfuscation to what you may be doing on the Net. It doesn't in any way provide any meaningful protection. The nature of TCP/IP precludes true anonymity. People pursuing anonymity through TCP/IP are the same kinds of people looking for perpetual motion machines.
I don't respond to AC's.
Mainly like this because it makes people into Tor nodes. This is a good thing all around.
Because as well all know, there's no way Tor could be compromised by the NSA, monitoring enough entrance and exit nodes to pick up your traffic and trace it to final destination.
From Merriam Webster:
to make (something) available to all people : to make it possible for all people to understand (something)
Democratization is a common term that existed long before USA appropriated "democracy" as part of their call to arms, you brainwashed yank.
Why does this country hate America? Why does it want America to fail? Terrorists and child pornographers are going to use this company's product to hurt people.
Do you really need to anonymize everything 24/7, like when you're watching Netflix? Doesn't that extra traffic overload the Tor network?
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Do not rely on TOR for anonymity.
Hardly a buzzword. To democratize something is to make it available to all. From the Greek demos (people) + kratia (power).
Proverbs 21:19
All I have to say is "What you are doing that important to keep secret"? I dont care if they read everything and every email i send. The only reason to be afraid of them spying on you is you are either doing something slightly illegal or imoral or you are a chimo(Child Molestor), terrorist, or just a POS human.
Tor is not a magic bullet. Anything you send over Tor can be intercepted by an exit node. If you send any identifying information over Tor, all the onion routing in the world won't help you. You can easily do this accidentally, all it takes is for you to visit a page with a google or facebook script on it. You can't just plug into Tor and expect it to take care of everything for you.
The only way to use Tor securely is to partition your Tor activities from everything else you do. This is most easily accomplished with a separate computer, or a VM used only for anonymous activities. Remember, it only takes one slip up and you are identifiable. That's how they got Ulbricht, and they can get you too.
A box that you plug into and forget about is going to provide nothing but a false sense of security. Bad idea.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Meghan Neil did.
Nice. My vocabulary is slightly larger; now I too can sound like an idiot by using words misinterpreted by other people who don't properly understand. How do I profit from this?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Thought it was already well known the the security and privacy of TOR was an illusion.
https://tails.boum.org/
You can buy Adafruit's version already built with US and US intelligence friendly exit nodes excluded here for only a few bucks more PAPARouter
You were offered a dictionary definition of democratize accompanied by the etymology. Whether you profit from that gift is up to you.
You're doing it wrong, motherfucker
This will probably just wind up getting me banned from WoW for "suspicious activity".
Now put the same thing in every ISP's box and while some are at reviewing the future of the HTTP protocol let's Torify that by default too.
The cloud is dead, back to the basics, distribution, resilience, decentralization and utter win.
Except that's not the definition any of the sources I have access to offer:
democratize, democratise:
vb (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) (tr) to make democratic
Democratization (or democratisation) is the transition to a more democratic
political regime.
democratise:
verb (used with object), verb (used without object), democratized, democratizing. to make or become democratic.
democratize or democratise
verb
1. (transitive) to make democratic
You were right to be sceptical, it is an ambiguous and overused jargon term.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
He's the Republican version of the Hosts File guy. Or a shill paid by the Republican party. Just another offtopic troll, why do you bring attention to him by responding? Look, if you like biting trollbait, please log off first before responding so your score will start at 0 and I won't see it.
Moderators, this whole subthread should be at -1, including the stupid sean.
The nature of TCP/IP precludes true anonymity
You have no idea what you're talking about.
It is so much better to let the exit node owners to monitor your traffic right? Ok fine, they can't trace it back to you, but do expect every malicious thing possible to be done on your traffic.
http://arstechnica.com/security/2007/09/security-expert-used-tor-to-collect-government-e-mail-passwords/
Lol, it's so funny reading you speak of "the nature of TCP/IP" with such blatant ignorance of the actual things involved. Obvious trolling, dude. Go to twitter.
And you in a jail cell, if you host an exit node on it. Remember kiddies, you are responsible for what comes out your pipe.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is just not true these days. You can browse at quite a reasonable speed, even download multi-gigabyte files without major delay. Perhaps you accidentally set it to run as a relay and didn't use the bandwidth limiter (thus ensuring all your available bandwidth would be consumed by others)?
The kind of people and activities that need TOR to provide extreme anonymity need significantly more than just TOR alone to do it effectively. This seems like it could lull people into assuming otherwise.
I Tor a box once. Now I have to send a check each week.
I'm interesting in sucking your dick.
Most uninformed post of the entire story? Only time will tell!
Not a problem.If it interferes with the NSA then they will just subpoena the data or congress will create a new law to sidestep it.Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated!
Look dammit, I can tell you FOR FACT that TOR is owned. EVERY TOR node is compromised and packets can be traced form source to dest. Can I show you proof sufficient to satisfy skeptics among you? Nope, but I can give you my word and, while I'm not a Spaniard, I'm damned honest.
You clearly have never read a RFC. You should consider learning a bit before spouting off at the mouth.
I don't respond to AC's.
The meanings of words can change over time, and dictionary definitions are often behind the curve. Merriam-Webster's online dictionary gives as its third definition of democratic "relating to, appealing to, or available to the broad masses of the people". And for democratize they give the example sentence, "The magazine's goal is to democratize art".
If you'd like to know more about how words change over time, you should ask about the process in the discussion forum at Wordorigins.com.
Proverbs 21:19
You did not acknowledge it, but hopefully you noticed that I didn't say "the new use rife in modern trashy jargon is wrong" and explicitly described it as "ambiguous", as the word is in a state of evolution.
As long as there's putting power in the masses' hands, I have no objection to the term; for example, guiding the editorial policy of a periodical. However, a statement such as "twitter is democratizing the internet" I would consider to be a serious dilution of the earlier meaning of the term.
Slavery is democratising pyramid-building.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
(shrug) Well, that's how it goes with words. What you like or what I like is irrelevant. I went to the OED, the de facto arbiter of English word definitions, and they have for democratize "make (something) accessible to everyone", with the following example sentence, "mass production has not democratized fashion." This is using the word in the same way that the OP used the word. I think if it's in the OED we can be confident that the word is not "in a state of evolution", but is acceptable for use in this sense.
Proverbs 21:19
The OED lost the plot about a decade ago. By the time they're including things that have not proven to have any momentum in the language, and which then fall completely out of use, then following up with a new set of updates with even less traction, you know that they've completely forgotten what their mandate is.
While I wish I agreed with it, I completely disagree with your final sentence.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I'm sorry you disagree fatphil. Personally, I am not prepared to challenge the OED or MW in their assessments, but perhaps you are. People are using the word "democratize" in this fashion, like it or not. I know, I know. These things can be maddening. For instance, I do not like it when people use "literally" as an intensifier. It gets under my skin. Yet, that is what they are doing. I wish you luck in tilting at this particular windmill.
Proverbs 21:19
I have plenty of spare lances.
;-)
Aside - you'll be pleased to know that as of just 2 days ago I decided thenceforth to use "literarily" to mean "expressed as one would find in literature, namely exagerated or fictionalised". To contrast against "literally", clearly
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I think this PapaRouter exit node blacklisting scheme is only a benefit to public privacy if there is no fiber tap between the Tor exit node and the public web site that you are trying to reach--but filtering Tor exit nodes by geographic location would in no way guarantee this. In some cases, it could actually compromise your privacy by forcing unencrypted traffic to pass through a monitored long distance cable, when it might not have done that if the exit node was in close proximity to the destination web site.*1
We now know that major ISP networks have been compromised by corrupt governments which use our taxes to purchase this kind of cooperation through bribery, instead of an unconstitutional order from a secret court or secret agency.*2 Even if the browser could tell you when the unencrypted traffic between your exit node and the web site is passing through a country that is hostile to your privacy, it is still basically just a threat level indicator with no reliable accuracy. As some of these articles indicate, the state has transitioned from merely monitoring traffic to MODIFYING traffic, in an attempt to exploit software vulnerabilities.*3 And nothing would prevent any carrier along the data path from doing the same thing. So now everyone needs the data transport encrypted all of the time, even if they are not a political dissident or a business trying to protect their network from hackers.
The only permanent solution I can see would be for every web site to have a presence on the Tor network. When people type a public URL into their browser, a Tor DNS server would have to intercept that request and return the address of the equivalent "hidden service" on the Tor network, so nothing is ever sent across the public internet in an unencrypted form; not even metadata. After typing a standard URL, the Tor browser would have to tell you if the site has a presence on the Tor network or not, and you could choose whether you wanted to connect based on the result. Is that feasible? I dont know enough about it to make this kind of determination. Is there anything that a web site hosting company can do to offer Tor gateways to all of their customers at once, or somehow make it easier for the customer to set this up? If so, it would definitely give them a competitive advantage.
If we want public web sites to participate in the Tor network, it needs to be easy for their visitors--and memorizing the URL of Tor hidden services is not easy. If you make it easy for a public web site to participate in the Tor network and they still refuse to do so, then you might have a reason not to trust the site. Only then would the loss of customers motivate the site operator to get on board and support these privacy protections. Could there come a time when many key routers on the internet are Tor routers too--or at least hybrids which support Tor DNS traffic? Would that mitigate the risk presented by bad Tor nodes which are run by secret government actors? I do not claim to be an expert, but I am eager to learn how to implement good security practices and procedures, so any comments or corrections are certainly welcome. The more that Tor can do to make this "idiot proof", the better.
*1 - US and its “Five Eyes” intelligence partners tap high speed fibre optic cables at 20 locations worldwide
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/new-snowden-leaks-reveal-us-australias-asian-allies-20131124-2y3mh.html
*2 - AT&T gets paid millions by the CIA to give up user data
http://rt.com/usa/cia-att-savage-logs-382/
*2 - NSA paid millions to Internet companies to cover surveillance program costs
http://rt.com/usa/nsa-payed-internet-companies-911/
*3 - Our Government Has Weaponized the Internet
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/11/this-is-how-the-internet-backbone-has-been-turned-into-a-weapon/
*3 - Peeling back the layers of Tor
http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/oct/04/egotistical-giraffe-nsa-tor-document
Hey there, PAPArouter sales dude!
Why do you keep spamming the forums with advertisements for PAPArouter like this:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4476331&cid=45494749
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4476331&cid=45494715
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4475985&cid=45493115 (logged-in users only)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4433345&cid=45391743 (archived)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4432761&cid=45390809 (archived)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4282975&cid=44993393 (archived)
And why did you lie about PAPArouter being "only a few bucks more"? It's actually DOUBLE the cost of SafePlug -- for adding a couple of lines to a config file? Who do you think you are fooling?
"you must be really tired from trying to stay relevant"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4282975&cid=44993393
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4476331&cid=45494749