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Tor Is Building the Next Generation Dark Net With Funding From DARPA
Patrick O'Neill writes: After years of relative neglect, Tor has been able to dedicate increasing time and resources to its hidden services thanks to funding in part by DARPA, as well as an upcoming crowdfunding campaign. DARPA's funding lasts 1-3 years and covers several projects including security and usability upgrades that close the gap between hidden services and the everyday Internet. "Next-generation hidden services may be run from multiple hosts to better deal with denial of service attacks and high traffic in general, a potentially big power boost that further closes the gap between the Dark Net and normal websites. ... Hidden services, which make up about 4 percent of the entire Tor network, have until recently been relatively neglected when it comes to funding and developing."
Yes, This is pretty much press bloat. Improving hidden services has been a long time goal of them, read their blog. This is just a press release that they've got funding, and actually started working on that.
There are multiple problems with hidden services, for example you can't delegate your domain, meaning that you can't keep a root key containing your master keys offline, and have a VPS or similar server (which you don't trust) run the onion page.
"The government" isn't one big entity. There are a lot of agencies in it and some have very conflicting goals. Even in the NSA itself some will be working on securing everything more so that their government is safe from spying while others will be working on breaking everything more, so that other governments can be spied on.
And isn't this just really a grant? Its not like darpa controls the implementation, they just point out what they want to be worked on, no?
A large chunk of DARPA do not like NSA.
Hell, a large chunk of NSA don't like NSA either.
Not everyone agrees with the shit they have been doing to (not) catch criminals.