Tor is easier to use than ever

superb usability!

Tor is now super easy to use! (thanks all involved!)

just get the tor bundle – it is tor bundled with firefox https://www.torproject.org/download/

Tor visualized:

https://torflow.uncharted.software/

most users are legit: but criminals (ab)using tor should be bocked

let’s face it, technology can be used for good & evil, would claim 99% use it for good, but there is still the malicious 1%, what to do with/about it?

it could lead to the media seriously discrediting tor, with sentences such as: “50% of the attacks are leveraging the Tor anonymity service to mask their true origins”

https://thehackernews.com/2021/12/new-local-attack-vector-expands-attack.html

Is Tor gov sponsored?

partly – yes – by U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor

https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/

BUT: Washington just approoved it’s biggest defense spending budget ever ($768 billion) (a lot of money for high tech weapons) while at the same time, other parts of the US-gov can also support some good projects as Tor.

Is Tor essentially an NSA honeypot?

No, guess not (yet).

There are many many attacks on Tor in order to try to break it.

(just recently a probably gov sponsored group called KAX17)

“Given the number of servers run by KAX17 the calculated probability of a Tor user connecting to the Tor network through one of KAX17’s servers was 16%, there was a 35% chance they would pass through one of its middle relays, and up to 5% chance to exit through one.” (src)

The CIA very likely just likes the privacy a hidden onion service offers:

http://ciadotgov4sjwlzihbbgxnqg3xiyrg7so2r2o3lt5wz5ypk4sxyjstad.onion/index.html

Also it does not help, to publicly (youtube) say things such as “only perverts use tor”, because pretty sure that is no way the case.

Users in dictatorship countries have a lot to lose, when they can not do research in private, blogging in private or communications in private (anonymized as good as possible and encrypted as good as possible).

“Tor does not rely on trusting the operators of the exit nodes, and in fact if you comb through the Snowden leaks for the “Tor Stinks!” presentation, the NSA seem to have not found a way to defeat Tor when the tool is used correctly.

It often is not.

It is often used configured poorly, with out of date versions, with plug-ins that defeat anonymity, without end-to-end encryption.

Any of these, as examples, can give you away.

Are you ever going to be safe if specifically hunted by a state actor?

God no.

But so many of the bridges and nodes in the network are controlled by non-US entities, it’s a bit hard to define Tor as a honeypot of any one malicious agent.

Maybe dozens of state agencies are trying.

Let them try.”

src: https://www.quora.com/Is-Tor-essentially-an-NSA-honeypot

What does Corona = Covid19 mean for the tor team and other donation based activists?

the economic hurt must be immense – not only for restaurants and tourism, but other businesses are impacted as well – from ThyssenKrup to activists that depend on donations mostly from private people and small businesses. (ThyssenKrup unfortunately will very likely will give no donations to the tor project)

https://blog.torproject.org/

what is tor used for?

• yes users use tor to watch copyright protected content
• yes evil crackers spread viruses for ransomware

for example this very evil page (is rather old, now one bitcoin is ~$8000) was hosted as onion service:

but by the nature of such projects, technology is neither good nor bad, it is the people that use it for good or bad.

what tor was meant to be: privacy protection for

• the masses against bulk data collection
• protection for activists and journalists

from 1984 bulk mass surveillance and “mind reading” of whole nations.

“Tor is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. The name is derived from the acronym for the original software project name “The Onion Router”.^[6][7]

Tor directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network consisting of more than seven thousand relays^[8] to conceal a user’s location and usage from anyone conducting network surveillance or traffic analysis.

Using Tor makes it more difficult to trace Internet activity to the user: this includes “visits to Web sites, online posts, instant messages, and other communication forms”.^[9] Tor’s intended use is to protect the personal privacy of its users, as well as their freedom and ability to conduct confidential communication by keeping their Internet activities unmonitored.”

can tor be trusted in 2020?

“To create a misbehaving directory, an operator would have to first modify the code provided by Tor to add logging capabilities, making it unlikely the snooping was inadvertent or the result of some sort of glitch. Professor Noubir presented his findings on Friday at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in Germany along with Amirali Sanatinia, a PhD student who also participated in the research.”

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/malicious-computers-caught-snooping-on-tor-anonymized-dark-web-sites/

https://ytpak.net/watch?v=cJWsJ47joAQ