UK Parliament: Banning Tor Is Unacceptable and Technologically Impossible

An anonymous reader writes: Months after UK prime minister David Cameron sought to ban strong encryption, a new parliamentary briefing contradicts that, at least when it comes to Tor. The briefing says, "there is widespread agreement that banning online anonymity systems altogether is not seen as an acceptable policy option in the UK. Even if it were, there would be technical challenges." The briefing cites Tor's ability to circumvent such censorship in countries like China as well as looking at both legal and illegal uses of Tor.

Comments

Re:Common sense to you and me, but...

[albacrankie]

A note for those who think language should be descriptive. A "public school" in the UK is a very, very private school, often associated with unhealthy sexual practices and strange ways of speaking. Not everyone who attends such a school is a twat. Some are just plain cunts.

Re:How does tor anonimize the sender and receiver.

[Anonymous Coward]

Client randomly chooses 3 nodes to be "entry guards". They are always used as the first node in the circuit.

For each request* the client randomly chooses 3 nodes (the entry guard and 2 others). The third of these nodes needs to be configured as an exit node (unless you are accessing a .onion site).

The Entry node knows who you are (i.e. your IP), but not what you are connecting to.
The middle node knows who the entry node and exit node are, but nothing else.
The exit node knows what ip you are visiting (and can see the traffic to it unless you are using https) but not who you are.

You entry middle exit site

Each can see only the ones directly connected.

* A circuit is reused for multiple requests, the exact details of which are too complex to try to explain in this simple summery.

Re:Common sense to you and me, but...

[CrimsonAvenger]

After a mere two centuries, even the Catholic Church had to admit the world is NOT in the center of the universe.

I gather you're not aware that Copernicus was working for a Bishop of the Catholic Church?

A century and a half later, it even apologized for it's treatment of the late Galileo!

Of course, what they were apologizing for was trying Galileo for the crime of calling the Pope an idiot in his book.

No, Galileo wasn't being tried for heliocentrism, even nominally, he was tried for asserting heliocentrism without PROOF.

Note, however, that the actual reason the Pope was butthurt over Galileo is that Galileo put a character into his book explaining heliocentrism named "simpleton", which character was, from internal clues, clearly meant to be the Pope.