Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it | Engadget
The Onion Router, now called Tor, is a privacy-focused web browser run by a nonprofit group.
It's really worth reading the article.
Tor can be used for any internet browsing you usually do. The key difference with Tor is that the network hides your IP address and other system information for full anonymity.
The company behind a VPN can still access your information, sell it or pass it along to law enforcement. With Tor, there’s no link between you and your traffic, according to Jed Crandall, an associate professor at Arizona State University.
I don't know if it's even possible, but it would be cool if I could use the fediverse over TOR just for the sake of supporting TOR. Not sure if there would have to be specific .onion instances, if normal instances could just be mirrored with a .onion address, or if a .onion instance would even be able to federated in the first place. I just don't know how it works.
Other use cases may include keeping the identities of sensitive populations like undocumented immigrants anonymous, trying to unionize a workplace without the company shutting it down, victims of domestic violence looking for resources without their abuser finding out or, as Crandall said, wanting to make embarrassing Google searches without related targeted ads following you around forever.
I'm certain an all-out legislative war would be waged against TOR if it were to become popularized for most of those reasons, under the more convenient guise of "criminals and children!"
Tor can be used for any internet browsing you usually do. The key difference with Tor is that the network hides your IP address and other system information for full anonymity
Also, this isn't true. MANY sites and services block access from Tor, including major ones that people use everyday.
Also. Those running an exit node can and do sniff traffic.
It’s bad practice to login to stuff that’s important (like banking) over tor. Or login to anything over for you have logged into over the clear.
Also, nation states can track you using a variety of techniques from fingerprinting to straight up working together to associate connection streams. A large number of tor nodes are run by alphabet agencies. Hell the protocol was developed by the us navy.
You don't need to access a .onion instance to use Tor. You can simply perform your day-to-day web usage through Tor directly.
On your phone, you can even use Tor natively with most of your apps.
I'm certain an all-out legislative war would be waged against TOR if it were to become popularized for most of those reasons, under the more convenient guise of "criminals and children!"
I guess we'll have to see what happens after that right wing Twitter account posted CSAM, Twitter suspended the account, then Elon said they removed the posts and reinstated the account 🤷🏽♂️
I mean, I've used it. It works. But I don't get why you would bother most of the time. It's slow as hell and while I'm generally fairly concerned about my privacy there is a point where I can't be bothered.
Well any instance owner could also get an onion link and host the instance over tor.
Of course the instance itself can't really hide. Since it needs to federate with others that are not onions. But your accesses would all show as from localhost.
I don’t know if it’s even possible, but it would be cool if I could use the fediverse over TOR just for the sake of supporting TOR.
Here are two #Mastodon onion nodes:
I always have Tor installed and I often use it instead of incognito browser sessions when researching stuff. It's sometimes slow and Cloudflare made it a lot more annoying to use than ~5-10 years ago, but I'm glad it exists.
I'm sure it's still more useful to US interests though, or it wouldn't be funded anymore.
Actual legal risks and consequences don't go away by applying wishful thinking.
Which are what
Yeah, is this guy living in China?
I don't think I really have a reason to use it.
The reason is privacy, everybody has a reason to use it.
While I agree with you, I'm wondering what the benefit is of watching youtube and posting/reading lemmy/mastodon through a tor network. Because those are the main things I do. While I do understand that in some countries and also in public wifi networks the chances of traffic being intercepted and man in the middle attacks are higher, I do not expect that to happen to my fibre connection in my western country.
then try reading the article
I'd rather not waste my time reading an article about a program I'm not currently using to find out if I should use it our not. I'd rather see a post that has bulletpoints with pre's and cons. My time is limited enough as it is.
[edit] I realise that my comment will probably come across as unfriendly so I will add some explaining to it.
I am currently in a western country using a fibre landline and I trust my internet provider to not intercept my data or use things like a man in the middle attack. Am I right for assuming that and if so, would tor prevent that? Will tor slow down my internet? I mostly watch youtube videos and read/post on lemmy/mastodon. I am not against using tor at all, but my energy and time are limited so I don't feel like reading a whole article just for an app I do not feel the need to use. I am currently very happy with my firefox browser and all the add-ons I use. And with all the modifications I have put into it to make it work just the way I like. Would I loose all that by switching to tor? I am prepared to change to tor but I am not in the camp of "protect privacy at all costs, even if it greatly inconveniences me". Especially if the risks of not using tor seem quite low in my situation.
It's a hidden setting because it's not recommended to change that setting for people who need anonymity.
This setting?
I heard of a guy who went to prison because he bought something from Allegro (Polish Amazon) over TOR. Someone used the same exit node for hacking, so they pinned it on him.
What country? Sounds like a kangaroo court or a court staffed entirely by old people.
court staffed entirely by old people
Isn't that most courts?
Poland.
He could've easily got it solved but he didn't have money and the public defender just told him confessing was the best option.
It might be a legend, it's just a thing that supposedly happened to someone in a community I participate in.
Yeah, that ruling is ridiculous.
Actual legal risks and consequences don't go away by applying wishful thinking.
I thought the point of Tor was the anonymity?
Your anonymity goes out the window when you log in to any service. Your privacy goes when you give them your shipping information.
"Czesc, I am Mister Anonymous. I would like to buy this Book. Please send it to Jan Pawel at this address, dziekuje."
I will use it if the speed is comparable to normal browsing......
In my experience it's a bit slower but not by much, I usually only access text based websites over Tor though with minimal images, streaming over YouTube can be horribly slow but it's generally worked okay for me.
It's a web browser. Slower than others and some pages won't work but other than that, it does just that.
...I mean, it's more like the web browser makes it easy to use the Tor network. The network is the slow part. Your requests are getting ping-ponged all over the world intentionally taking the long way around.
It's great for anything low bandwidth that isn't tied to your identity, and helps for peace of mind, despite its issues. You do run into captcha or DDOS protection issues occasionally, but the new tor circuit for this site button sometimes works. Also it uses letterboxing to prevent resolution-based fingerprinting, which isn't very pretty, but leaving it at its default size (or locking the size using the WM) works well and is good for privacy.
On the other hand, there’s no way to track you. Useful for looking up medical info in a way that search engines and such can’t relate back to you. Often I’ll keep browsing in it once I’ve opened it because it’s just basically Firefox.
This is only true if you have the most "paranoid" security level selected, and at that point anything that relies on Javascript (or any of the other features that get blocked) will break. Enabling Javascript or the other blocked Web features will make it fairly trivial to track you especially the more you browse, so at that point you might as well just be using a regular VPN.
Tor itself isn't the problem in this equation, it's the browser, and they tend to leak information like a sieve
It's great when you want to connect two devices behind NAT without relying on any specific third-party server or service. I ssh to my laptop from my phone with it when away from it.
It's also useful to circumvent censorship, though it depends on the country. Also, websites employing wide-range IP blocks, in my experience, more often than not still allow Tor.
I use it to access any websites that I want to that Virgin Media block due to court orders issued by the UK high court.
Virgin Media
Damn. Looks like the UK is more restrictive than I'd thought.
I use it, it's a bit slow and you sometimes get lots of captchas but overall I think it's pretty good.
You go first.
I imagine more people would use Tor if they could get paid to provide bandwidth (like Orchid as described on FLOSS Weekly 633).
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Operating nodes is expensive, offers no reward, and comes with a serious legal risk.
This won't stop the NSA from operating a few. I assume that a significant portion of Tor nodes is run by intelligence agencies. If they control all nodes used for a connection(i believe three are used), they can probably piece together what connections a user is having.
It is expensive. And yeah, it might get you into trouble in some places.
And yes, the glowies use it, but journalists and whistleblowers use it too.
But that's part of its appeal. How else do I know I'm one of the cool kids?
People treat this as a suggestion. It's actually a warning. A warning of what will happen if we overuse TOR.
I'm under the impression that my use will only make it slower for people who really need it.
It will take some performance, but it's also creating noise which is a good thing.
There's still plenty of bandwidth to go around: https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth.html
On the desktop, I use Whonix which does utilize the Tor Network. That being said, I rarely use the Tor browser outside of it.
Are there any good iOS Tor browsers? All that I’ve seen are either shit or require some insane subscription.
I've always wondered what it would be like, but I've also heard so many creepy stories about it I just don't want someone hacking my bank because I'm an idiot. So I stay away from it. I wish I was more tech savy.
Are you confusing Tor and something like deep/dark web? Because Tor itself is just a webbrowser, it's basically a Firefox with some modifications for stricter privacy.
There's a TOR browser, but calling tor "just a browser" is really odd and not really correct. The TOR project is the routing protocol that bounces your traffic around. You can do so through the TOR browser, but the browser isn't TOR. It also isn't the only way to use TOR.
Also, while HTTPS is close to universal now, it's still possible to use HTTP and theoretically a malicious exit node could modify any unencrypted traffic.
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Thanks for the info! I'll save this comment for further study.
Hate to burst your bubble but many of the stories are just that, stories. Vast majority of the onion sites out there are either forums like 4chan or hobbyist sites like the old days of the internet.
Illegal websites do exist but they're rare and hard to find, they also are subject to being taken down. They're nothing like the stories though. In fact majority of the websites that exist when you search for these topics are just bitcoin scams, i.e. a livestream website that asks you to pay $200 in bitcoin to enter, almost certainly a scam because livestreaming over Tor is terrible due to low spead and it breaks the anonymity due to generating tons of unique traffic.
TL;DR Tor is a tool that can be used for privacy on the clearnet it can also be used to host your own onion sites. Dark web stories do have a small element of truth to them but are mostly scary stories to tell in the dark.
Why, no, thank you, I don't have any appreciation for this bubble you are bursting. I figured some had to be just tales but it's hard to know exactly how much of it is bs. So thanks.
Why would I use it? I get that we need it for journalists and stuff but it's mostly used by hackers
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Might also be a good idea to use something like Ublock origin and Portmaster as well, don't just try to curate ad targeting, block them, if you want to still support websites you can use something like adnauseam which clicks the ads.
I'm not trying to say that Tor isn't a good idea because they should be blocking ads, I think more people should absolutely use it for better anonymous browsing, I only bring up ad blockers because if people don't want to be targeted ads they should be blocking them.
Bonus: Add anti-adblock filters to ad-block, it helps significantly with sites that try to detect them, also spam and malware filters are essential.