Comment by lifeisstillgood

Comment by lifeisstillgood 10 months ago

19 replies

I am interested in the “legitimate” uses for tor. I have not kept up with this but I understand it was designed by US Navy to make it hard for oppressive regiemes to track their citizens use of web.

What do we want Tor for except as a hope that Russian citizens might be able to get to the BBC site?

I am asking honestly - and would prefer not to be told my own government is on the verge of a mass pogrum so we had better take precautions.

knodi123 10 months ago

For the same reason we have SSL on this site, despite the fact that it has no sex, no storefront, nor any access to my banking or private information.

If everything is SSL secured, then we don't have to explain why any specific thing is SSL secured. The same reason can be applied to use of TOR.

  • fragmede 10 months ago

    The point ranking on comments, which is private, would be of interest to parties training an LLM and want the data annotated, but your point stands.

    • judge2020 10 months ago

      I’m not sure how much more useful that is than just using HN’s automatic ranking for comments, at least outside of parent comments on posts; As far as I can tell, child comments are always ORDER BY score DESC.

      Even for top level comments, HN’s algorithm for ranking is pretty useful for assigning “worth”

      • fragmede 10 months ago

        On posts there's an attempt to suface later comments (with fewer points) so the comment section isn't dominated by earlier posts.

        Ordering by score DESC only gives you relative point information, not absolute. Theres additional signal if the top comment has 100 points vs only having 3 (and the bottom post also having 100 vs 1).

    • pc86 10 months ago

      "Every site having SSL is a Good Thing because it means you don't need to defend your use of SSL. If more people used Tor it would mean you didn't need to defend your use of Tor."

      "Yeah but Y Combinator made a decision that makes it harder for me to auto-generate spam."

sureIy 10 months ago

How would you feel if a stranger came up to you in the street and said they appreciated the wiki article you were reading last night?

I think everyone wants “privacy by default”, they just don’t make the connection between this hypothetical and real life. In real life you’re still spied but nobody confronts you directly.

  • lifeisstillgood 10 months ago

    Why is that any different to my neighbour leering over the fence and saying he could hear me and my wife last night “having a good time”

    I mean he probably could hear it, and I hope no one on HN who heard their neighbour would bring it up on the street !

    We do not have secrecy. We have privacy which is merely the politeness of our neighbours (which is of course a social construct of behaviour).

    The internet has given new spaces that have not yet had the time for us to learn such behaviours. What will help us is making the internet more like our daily lives. No anonymity, etc.

    But people somehow think the internet should be different - it’s not and it’s better - if we think our lives should be more free then politics is the pave for that not the router.

    • botanical76 10 months ago

      This is a bizarre take. Of course, no person is completely unknown to other individuals. While my neighbour may have access to that which allows him to make crude comments in the street, this is a physical limitation. It is not at all desirable that my house has information leakage. If it were feasible/cost effective to make my house completely soundproof I likely would.

      The internet is different. There are trade offs to privacy just like the real world, but it is not physical. Encryption exists. It protects real people from real governments that feature oppressive regimes. It protects them _now_, not in some distant future where N protests, elections or uprises have toppled all government entities that abuse their power. This seems to be a lofty ideal that we should all trust each other, our governments, our isps, our web services.

      I think the crucial part is choice. You are welcome to blog every wikipedia article you visit, or live stream every activity you partake in over Twitch. But this is not a requirement to use the internet.

      • sureIy 10 months ago

        This is it. It’s like comparing “being seen by others at a nudist beach” vs “being recorded for the whole world to watch forever.” Not the same.

        Also a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate their neighbor talking (or even hearing) about them having sex.

cubesnooper 10 months ago

I browse social media sites like Facebook and Reddit using their onion services. I was sick of seeing ads pop up that were clearly based on tracking my general browsing activity through IP correlation, tracking pixels and embedded “like” buttons. So now I block all cleartext Facebook/Reddit traffic completely.

Using Tor this way doesn’t anonymize me—on Facebook at least, I’m logged in under my own account—but it limits the profile Meta builds on me to the union of what it directly observes on Facebook and what it can purchase through data brokers. Ever since I started doing this, I’ve noticed a huge drop in relevance in my Facebook ads, so apparently it’s working. When the ads become suddenly relevant again (which has happened a few times), it exposes an information leak: usually a credit card purchase that Meta must have obtained from either my bank or the shop vendor and tied to my identity.

Using a VPN could theoretically provide the same benefit, but in practice Facebook tended to temporarily lock my account when using a VPN and Reddit blocks VPN traffic completely. So I stick to the onion services, which are run by the websites themselves and so are less likely to be treated as malicious traffic.

If you use these platforms, I recommend bookmarking their onion sites in Tor Browser and using it as your primary interface to them for a while. Then, if you don’t find it too inconvenient, start blocking the non‐onion versions of the sites on your network.

https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...

https://www.facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg...

(P.S.: You shouldn’t trust the links I just posted; I could have posted fake ones! I recommend double‐checking against https://github.com/alecmuffett/real-world-onion-sites which links to proofs of onion site ownership under their usual domain names.)

0xggus 10 months ago

>This is a collection of anonymous user stories from people who rely on Tor to protect their privacy and anonymity. We encourage you to share their experiences with your network, friends and family, or as part of your work to promote the use of privacy-preserving technologies like ours and help us defend strong online protections.

https://community.torproject.org/outreach/stories/

andai 10 months ago

Are there legitimate arguments in favour of privacy, and private communications? It seems to be largely the same issue.

We've come to accept (as a normal mainstream thing) end to end encryption in several popular messaging apps (which seems to be largely thanks to WhatsApp?), but the same idea applied to web browsing is still considered fringe for some reason. That distinction seems arbitrary to me, like just a cultural thing?

It might be a UX thing though. WhatsApp is pleasant. Trying to use the internet normally over Tor is horrendous (mostly thanks to Cloudflare either blocking you outright, or sending you to captcha hell).

smoe 10 months ago

Don't know if it is still used much. There is SecureDrop to facilitate communication between investigative journalists and sources/whistleblowsers via Tor that was at some point deployed by several prominent news organizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SecureDrop

whimsicalism 10 months ago

most governments retaliate to some degree against journalists, whistleblowers, etc. - no pogrom needed

pc86 10 months ago

Let's not discount the validity of making it easier for Russians, or Chinese, or North Koreans, to get western media.

  • gen2brain 10 months ago

    Because how else would they know that Kamala used to work in mcdonalds. Pure gold in western media.

    • pc86 10 months ago

      If you think my comment can in any way be construed as saying all western media is great, please get help.