Actual legal risks and consequences don't go away by applying wishful thinking.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Which are what
I am not sure what he's hinting at. Just using Tor doesn't bear any legal risks. Hosting an exit node is different, as depending on the country you might get into serious trouble if certain traffic goes through it.
Yes exactly, and I think there have been stories recently where the exit node host has been held liable for content that's gone through it.Which is complete bullshit, but the unfortunate reality is that the legal system doesn't need to understand technology to regulate it.
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Yeah, is this guy living in China?
To give you an idea, last time I used Tor, I suddenly started to get a bunch of connection attempts from the FBI. Was I doing anything illegal? Nope. Was TOR a legal liability? You betcha.
Connection attempts from the FBI? Could you specify that a bit further?
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I suddenly started to get a bunch of connection attempts from the FBI.
How can I observe connection attempts like this?
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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.
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I've literally always browsed Lemmy over Tor. I even made this account over it, which surprised me when it worked.
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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.
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It would help if Tor would be more useful for regular use. The few times I used it, it was for VPN-style geolocation circumvention. Tor supports it by changing ExitNodes, but the setting is hidden deep down in a config file and required a restart. Not exactly a great user experience for a setting that you might wanna flip pretty frequently.
It's a hidden setting because it's not recommended to change that setting for people who need anonymity.
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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.
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I imagine more people would use Tor if they could get paid to provide bandwidth (like Orchid as described on FLOSS Weekly 633).
You go first.
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.
I have a special hate for cloudflare in me I can't describe
Any time I've tried to use Tor in the past I gave up because it was frustratingly slow.
Those onion layers don't add up to nothing.. also I've heard it's under constant attack. Plus not enough people running relays and exit nodes.
There is no amount of money that you could pay me to run an exit node
I don't think I really have a reason to use it.
The reason is privacy, everybody has a reason to use it.
In theory yes, but practically speaking trying to access a lot of the modern web over TOR would be at best painfully slow and at worst almost impossible thanks to DDoS protection providers like cloudflare.
This right here. A very large part of the web is inaccessible from TOR. Last I tried you couldn't access social media, Google constantly forces you through captchas because it thinks you're a bot, and anything on a CDN will either forces captchas or just doesn't work. Financial institutions absolutely are all inaccessible.
Privacy is important, but most of the places you want to go with TOR to stay private won't let you in because malicious actors want to use it for the same reasons.
Facebook has an official.onion domain and it's the only way I access it, as it's required for my employer.
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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.
Unless you browse Geocities sites from 1998, intercepting and MITMing is simply not an issue. Everything built nowadays uses https, which fully protects you against those.
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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.
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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.
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