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> The things that makes TOR useful for people avoiding prosecution also makes it useful for people involved in malicious and criminal activities ... Everything
by apeace 9y ago
> The things that makes TOR useful for people avoiding prosecution also makes it useful for people involved in malicious and criminal activities ... Everything from spam and network attacks to trafficking people and contraband.
> Although the Tor Project could promote options to restrict these malicious actions, they choose to do nothing. Seriously: if a TOR hidden service offers hard-core drugs or human trafficking or fake IDs, then they should be shut down.
I hope I can convince some folks here to be skeptical of this kind of thinking.
Think about it: If the Tor project came up with some clever way to take down bad hidden services, then what would be stopping a government from forcing them to take down legitimate hidden services too? And meanwhile, the criminals would move on to some other Tor-like service, and keep doing their thing.
In short, you're not going to stop criminals, who will always find a way to keep doing what they're doing. You will, on the other hand, impede the free speech of honest users.
The Tor project should focus on making it impossible for hidden services to be taken down--even by the Tor project itself! And they do :)
- mhuffman 9y ago> The things that makes TOR useful for people avoiding prosecution also makes it useful for people involved in malicious and criminal activities ... Everything from spam and network attacks to trafficking people and contraband. It is ok if someone that doesn't understand it says those sorts of things, but when an organization like cloudflare[1] jumps on the goof-troop bandwagon, it really does make a difference. [1] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trouble-cloudflare https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trouble-cloudflare
- Confiks 9y agoI'm not too sure what "jumping on the goof-troop bandwagon" means to you, or what difference you are referring to. Cloudfare /did/ invest a lot of time communicating and trying to remedy the situations with the DDoS. The is evident in the amount of communication that can be found in the bugtracker.
- apeace 9y agoI hope I can make you more skeptical of the "Cloudflare is the bad guy" trope. Cloudflare is lightyears ahead of any CDN when it comes to supporting Tor. They specifically built controls so that web sites can remove CAPTCHAs for Tor users completely.[0] They also do not block/CAPTCHA Tor users automatically. They treat Tor IPs like any IPs: if they detect abuse from the IP, they start giving the CAPTCHA. Finally, Cloudflare has stated publicly[1] that they have a desire to setup .onion sites for their customers automatically. But they cannot do so until the Tor project is able to upgrade the hashing algorithm used for .onion addresses. If the two organizations could work together, this could be game-changing for online anonymity. Imagine millions of web sites automatically supporting Tor! I can't understand why the HN crowd is so anti-Cloudflare. This Tor thing seems to be one of the major misconceptions. Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with with either Tor or Cloudflare in any way. [0] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203306930-Does-CloudFlare-block-Tor- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/203306930-D... [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/
- cortesoft 9y agoI think a lot of people on HN are anti-Cloudflare because of the way they portray themselves in blog posts. Every blog post makes it sound like they are saving the internet. In addition, their response to the memory leak issue a few months back left a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. They attacked Google unfairly for not purging their leaked content fast enough, while trying to downplay the severity of the mistake they made.
- mhuffman 9y agoMy link was a direct response to your second link. I do not believe cloudflare on your first link (that they treat tor ips like any ips). I can tell you from experience that I have never connected to a cloudflare backed site with tor that didn't require multiple captchas. So every tor ip is hostile to cloudflare sites? If so, how is that practically different than just blocking tor? I think that if you read the response at your first link again, you can see that they are implying what you are saying, but that are not saying what you are saying. I think they are blocking tor, but explaining it in a diplomatic way.
- thraway2016 9y agoAs larger proportions of the infosec community get hired or contracted by law enforcement, intelligence, and other government agencies, you'll find that the respect for liberty that the hacker manifesto espoused is increasingly hard to find. The prescient Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
- drvdevd 9y agoI don't understand how a professional in infosec couldn't see the necessity of anonymity in myriad use cases. Overlay networks seem to be the only viable option in many scenarios....?
- linkregister 9y agoAre you sure it's not the other way around? It appears that the commercial opportunity for infosec has increased drastically in the last 10 years. I mean, yeah, it's not the early 1990s anymore, where mostly academics and enthusiasts were on the internet. But is the hacker manifesto a standard to hold infosec practitioners who likely were in diapers during the halcyon days you refer to?
- CM30 9y agoThe same thing is true of freedom of speech and other systems that allow for that. Give people the ability/right to say anything without censorship and you'll get bullies, trolls, extremists and other horrible people taking advantage of it. But it's better you live with that in order to protect 'normal' people's freedom of speech rather than censor it and set a bad precedent. In both freedom of speech and privacy, you have to be willing to support the rights of those people consider 'horrible' in order to help the greater population as a whole.
- PppPpppPppP 9y agoFreedom of speech means freedom from the government interfering in what you have to say (eg: Snowden). Letting people say whatever they want on the Internet does result in bullies, trolls, extremists and other horrible people talking louder than more thoughtful speech, and in the end it silences reasonable people. There is no law that forces me as an individual to respect what you say or to not try to silence you. Censorship can only be done by the government, not by individuals; no one should trust the unfair bully who cries unfairness at being silenced. *** It's the silencing of obnoxious voices that allows thoughtful voices to be heard. ***
- TuringTest 9y agoWhere do you place the line that differentiates a government from a very powerful "private" individual? (or congregation of individuals).
- TuringTest 9y agoTo those downvoting, the above is a honest question. If a powerful group has significant control over public speech (say Google and Facebook-like power), why shouldn't we be wary of their power to censor their opponents? Merely because they don't (directly) have the power of law behind them, doesn't make them less dangerous than a government.
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
- DINKDINK 9y agoPut simply, the cure is worse than the disease.
- tps5 9y agoYour argument sounds a lot like "criminals will always find a way, no point in gun control." The thing is, that argument can be applied to all laws. Why even have laws? Criminals will always find a way. Look, I agree that anonymity is important. I agree that the world is better if some things are kept absolutely private, from everyone, to whatever extent is possible. But let's not pretend that there aren't trade-offs.
- apostacy 9y agoOf course there are tradeoffs. But the price of a free society is that some people will abuse these freedoms. I wish these values were more popular.
- wyager 9y ago> "criminals will always find a way, no point in gun control" You could partially refute this argument by claiming that gun control is hard to ignore or bypass (although not that hard, speaking as someone who knows a fair amount about fabrication and guns). On the other hand, this argument ported over to Tor doesn't make any sense; if Tor intentionally cripples its functionality, criminals will move over to non-crippled solutions like I2P. The best you can hope for is to mildly and temporarily inconvenience criminals while really hurting innocent people who need Tor.
- mirimir 9y agoYes, Tor isn't secure for anyone unless it's secure for everyone. I mean, just look at what's been leaked from the CIA and NSA. There's no way to guarantee that any backdoor won't get leaked, or be discovered independently.
- lend000 9y agoA possible compromise: build "plugins" for Tor that can be downloaded and installed freely, similar to browser extensions. Some of these plugins may include traffic monitoring functionality that blacklists certain types of traffic/known malicious actors, greatly reducing the effectiveness of the network for criminals, if the majority of users choose not to forward their traffic.
- hahajk 9y agoThat first quote could be rewritten > The things that makes TOR useful for people avoiding prosecution also makes it useful for people avoiding prosecution.
- mirimir 9y agoActually, I suspect that they meant to write "The things that makes TOR [sic] useful for people avoiding persecution ..." ;)