RiverCrochet a day ago

1. It's fun. Playing with these technologies is entertaining and will learn you some good stuff about the networking and the encryption and what not.

2. Tor allows reception of unsolicited TCP/IPv4 traffic if you are behind a NAT you can't open ports for, because your connection to the network is initiated on your side. This is nice, especially with increasing prevalence of CGNAT.

3. Something my niece stated when I talked to her about it, who I disagree with: Many countries have a notion of upstanding citizen enforced by well funded and maintained violence-monopoly actors (R) that are not equivalent to what the majority of citizens actually do (S). R minus S is T - the tolerance gap. Things that allow T to exist include lack of will to prosecute, general social acceptance of things that were not acceptable years ago, etc. All things that are quite mutable. If your activities fall into T, privacy-enforcement tech benefits you if R and S might change in the future.

FWIW I am firmly in the "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" camp and I looked at her funny when she said this. Maybe she is a criminal or just crazy, idk.

  • Naturally a day ago

    Your niece's reasoning sounds excellent to me, I am pleased you have included it.

  • spl757 a day ago

    I'd like to place a camera in every room of your house and stream them on my website. Surely you won't mind because you have nothing to hide. Right?

  • WolfeReader 16 hours ago

    You believe you have "nothing to hide" from 1. your own government, 2. the government of a nation you happen to be visiting or communicating with, 3. corporations who slurp up and sell personal data, 4. organized crime, 5. con artists and phishers looking for an easy mark, 6. people who personally want to harm you or exploit you, 7. people who want to harm others in your life and would use you as a means to do so, 8. people who want to harm your race/gender/religion/etc and identified you as a member of their targeted group.

    Really?

    End-to-end encryption technologies (of which TOR is one) help prevent entire categories of attacks which would otherwise be available to all of those groups, to use against you and others.

mass_and_energy a day ago

The implication of the right to privacy being unnecessary because you have nothing to hide is akin to declaring the right to free speech unnecessary because you have nothing to say.

The ability to maintain privacy and anonymity is not for today, it's for tomorrow.

  • ciiiicii a day ago

    I don't think many people seriously think that terrorists planning attacks to maim and kill people, and pedophiles sharing child sexual abuse imagery with each other, have an absolute right to privacy in such communications, nor that doing so is an example of free speech.

    Really it's a good thing that the "global adversary" is - almost certainly - keeping tabs on Tor traffic and tracking down who is responsible for the worst abuses within this network.

    • lapphi a day ago

      You sound like a stalin era communist. The secret police are spying on you for your own good!

      • ciiiicii 18 hours ago

        Not sure what you mean. Gathering evidence is a vital part of investigating criminal activity. In the age of the internet, this includes evidence generated on computer networks, such as connection metadata from distributed systems like Tor.

        Why, in your view, is this akin to Stalinism? It's just standard police work adapted for modern technologies, not an indication of totalitarian governance.