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DuckDuckGo now operates a Tor exit enclave
- pclark 16y agoDo people actually use Tor, day to day?
- mike-cardwell 16y agoYes. Shitloads.
- wesley 16y agoShitloads of spammers.
- mike-cardwell 16y agohttps://www.torproject.org/faq-abuse.html.en#WhatAboutSpammers https://www.torproject.org/faq-abuse.html.en#WhatAboutSpamme...
- bitdiddle 16y agoI think the state department does, or did at one point
- pclark 16y agocan you quantify "shitloads" into an actual metric?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- mike-cardwell 16y agoLooks to be about 15,000 regulars atm in Iran alone: http://metrics.torproject.org/graphs.html#recurringusers http://metrics.torproject.org/graphs.html#recurringusers Plenty more graphs and stats on that page. Also read this for information about the type of people who use it: https://www.torproject.org/torusers.html.en https://www.torproject.org/torusers.html.en
- axod 16y agoFWIW Almost all other countries listed have no usage or very little.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoAll of the countries listed seem to have either thousands or hundreds of users. You think that's "no usage or very little" ? I guess that depends on your perspective. Tor is never going to be used by tens of millions of people. It doesn't need to be used by tens of millions of people to serve its purpose and be successful. I'm not sure why they only present that small subset of countries in their stats. I wish they'd provide more comprehensive stats.
- aw3c2 16y agoI use it for my "distractive" browsing. I access reddit/slashdot and other alike sites only through it. On the one hand it slows down, making me more selective and aware of what I do (ie I do not "wake up" 10 wikipedia links later) and on the other I have total privacy.
- jrockway 16y agoWell, not total privacy. Your browser leaks uniquely-identifiable information, Javascript tracking bugs + cookies track you, and your hard drive is subject to seizure by customs or law enforcement. Now, if you fake the UA with something very common, turn off most Javascript, and encrypt your hard drive in a deniable manner, then you are OK. (One of my side projects is to make the deniable encryption even easier for web browser history.)
- aw3c2 16y agoI do nothing illegal so harddrive encryption or anything tin-foily like that is irrelevant. (I do it though as it does not hurt and is so easy, plus if a HDD fails I can discard it without having to bother.) Cookies are per session. I use Firefox with Tor-Button. In the worst case there is "someone" who does the things I do. But no-one does connect that to me. You could do complicate analysis and pinpoint my demographic through that but no-one does that.
- jrockway 16y agoI did for a while, but have gotten lazy. There is latency, though it is nothing like dialup was. Why did I use Tor? Because a website whose FAQ said they don't log IPs (Slashdot) gave my IP to the Secret Service. The Service then came to my house with guns. Seriously. (I showed them the comment, and they went away. The agents investigating did not actually read the comment before coming to my house to question me about it. WTF?) Anyway, Tor is a necessity if you post content to the Internet. Although there is very little the legal system can do to you in the US for your protected speech, they can still fuck up and show up at your house to harass you. Use Tor, and they end up in Siberia instead.
- barmstrong 16y agoWow - what was the subject of the post they were investigating?
- jrockway 16y agoThe parent post said, "what are some things you can't say on the Internet". I replied, "I am going to kill the president." Guess I was right!
- kuahyeow 16y agoNo kidding, using Tor with usernames that link to profiles is pointless
- avar 16y agoThat's great, too bad I can't run this for my own sites because a bunch of idiot network admins (like those running IRC servers) will ban all traffic from Tor exit nodes without taking into account exit policies.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoYou could dedicate an IP specifically for Tor?
- avar 16y agoYes, but that requires paying extra for a dedicated IP just for that.
- mike-cardwell 16y agoTrue. How come your irc client lives on the same IP address as your website(s) though?
- avar 16y agoBecause I'm renting a single (Linode) VPS for development and hobby projects, not a bunch of machines. It's not just IRC either, a bunch of other services do naïve checking of Tor exit nodes.
- joeyh 16y agoI know tor publishes lists of exit nodes, but does it need to publish ips of exit enclaves? It clearly does not publish lists of ips running hidden services, and an exit enclave seems closer to that than an exit node.
- avar 16y agoWell yeah, it needs to publish a list of those, how else would Tor clients know how to exit through them?
- klync 16y agoCongrats again, Gabriel! I don't use Tor myself (atm, at least), but I admire your efforts to help address this concern for people. DDG is impressing me more and more every day. It's been the default in my search bar for a couple weeks now, working great. Here's to the future of DDG!
- quellhorst 16y agoHow much bandwidth will you allocate to tor?
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoI have it set as "BandwidthRate 1MB, BandwidthBurst 2MB" for now, though I'm going to monitor it and see what happens. Unfortunately, you can't prioritize exit enclave traffic atm.
- axod 16y agoI really don't understand the strategy here. DDG Seems to be entirely targeted towards people who want to be ultra secretive about what they're searching for. People looking for kiddieporn? Terrorists? Who are the users here? I'm not being negative here, I just have no idea what 'problem' is trying to be solved here.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoIt's not a strategy, just good policy.
- axod 16y agoWhy? What about when your service is used exclusively by law breakers? Will anonymity be a great policy then?
- gloob 16y ago"What about when your restaurant is frequented entirely by murderers? Will steak knives be good utensils then?"
- axod 16y agoThat's a very very poor analogy. Advertising your service as an untraceable anonymous service, is attractive to certain groups of people. A large amount of those are going to be engaging in unlawful activities. The analogy would be advertising your restaurant as one in which you are permitted to enter wearing full body disguises and helped with your exit through various escape routes. The restaurant owners will provide gloves for you, remove any traces of your DNA, etc. Don't you think such a restaurant would then be used by murderers? I would agree with your analogy in that an 'anonymous restaurant', where you are granted complete anonymity whilst inside, would also be a recipe for disaster. You kinda forgot the 'anonymity' bit in your analogy though... Convenient ;)
- mike-cardwell 16y ago
- minalecs 16y agothis is really a great service. caution: I've read many horror stories about people running exit nodes, and being charged with things that probably they had nothing to do with , but are very serious charges. Thats why exit nodes take the most balls to run.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoOnly DDG traffic exits from the node. The rest is just encrypted traffic relaying.
- api 16y agoNext submission: DuckDuckGo raided for child porn... (unfortunately)
- nailer 16y agoAn 'exit node' would normally get you raided for child porn, subverting islam, leaking state secrets or whatever else, yes. Apparently an 'exit enclave' is different.
- zitterbewegung 16y agoAlthough this is great that duckduckgo is doing this it seems like it would only apply to a select group of people concerned about their privacy. It doesn't seem like the average person would be aware about what Tor is and would use it. I'm just wondering about the practicality of operating a Tor exit enclave.