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'Silk Road Reloaded' Launches On a Network More Secret Than Tor
rossgneumann writes A new anonymous online drug market has emerged, but instead of using the now infamous Tor network, it uses the lesser known "I2P" alternative. "Silk Road Reloaded" launched yesterday, and is only accessible by downloading the special I2P software, or by configuring your computer in a certain way to connect to I2P web pages, called 'eepsites', and which end in the suffix .i2p. The I2P project site is informative, as is the Wikipedia entry.
How would you do a traffic study on a network that is encrypted or otherwise as private as it is?
Truth be told, it's not the media. We live in a world that is far freer than many would like to acknowledge, and for most purposes tor is a hassle or pointless. The end result is that tor is mostly only used when there is a very good reason for it, and since we live in fairly free society, that reason tends to be stuff that gives tor a bad reputation.
There is also this paradoxon that, if we lived in a society where tor would make a difference, tor would most likely not exist or be useless. This is the situation in Saudi Arabia and other similar places. This is so because the real weakness of tor is that, since it is not possible to hide the exit or entry nodes themselves, the network is easy to shut down or to filter out.
"There was a study done recently" that shows anything you want it to.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Bit of cognitive dissonance there. Even if the overwhelming majority of usage really is for nefarious purposes, that still implies a non-negligible minority of usage for legitimate purposes. That's not "in theory", that's in practice.
Couple that with the fact that I suspect such claims of "overwhelming majority" are looking at bandwidth, and porn is liable to be much more bandwidth-intensive than accessing information suppressed by oppressive regimes, and you could end up with a very different picture.
But hey, stamping out kiddie-porn is a much bigger priority than coordinating people fighting against oppressive governments that would casually murder those children instead, right?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.