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Ultimatest super-goal: make anonymity the default stance and socially accepted norm. Do with anonymous browsing what WhatsApp did with E2E encryption. Force big
by ComodoHacker 8y ago
Ultimatest super-goal: make anonymity the default stance and socially accepted norm. Do with anonymous browsing what WhatsApp did with E2E encryption. Force big data suckers to invent new business models for exploiting our data without breaching our privacy.
- chipperyman573 8y agoI can't read this article because I'm at work, but unless they managed to solve the problem of Tor being very, very, very slow, this will never happen. End users will definitely notice a difference and likely won't care about their privacy. They'll just see Firefox being way slower than Chrome and switch.
- astrodust 8y agoSo long as Tor depends on volunteers to maintain exit nodes, and with that the risk of being arrested for all sorts of criminal activity by non-tech-savvy law enforcement, this is how it'll be.
- openasocket 8y agoTor is slow because every packet has to be routed through several random servers distributed all over the world with multiple layers of crypto at every pass. Even with plenty of top-of-the-line inner and exit nodes you will still see substantially more latency than just sending packets directly.
- astrodust 8y agoThat wouldn't be as big an issue if all the nodes were very well connected, like positioned near big peering points, but they're not.
- seandougall 8y agoThe "distributed all over the world" part would still be just as much of an issue; the speed of light puts a substantial lower bound on the total latency.
- astrodust 8y agoTrue, but pinging from one hub to another is way faster than someone's cable modem in Mumbai to someone's in Australia to someone's in Peru and back again. Those last miles add up in a huge way.
- pathseeker 8y agoNo, IPSec tunnels to remote headquarters have indistinguishable latency impacts for normal users browsing (<150ms). The bad latency is because of congestion, not crypto and multiple hops.
- mirimir 8y agoMirimir typically uses a three-VPN nested chain. Just now, rtt to google.com was ~260 msec. That's four hops. Just not with servers on the far side of the planet.
- Exuma 8y agoWhat do you mean by this: "with that the risk of being arrested for all sorts of criminal activity by non-tech-savvy law enforcement" You can be arrested for things just by using Tor if they mix you up with someone else or something?
- ComodoHacker 8y agoDepending on jurisdiction — yes. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/access-now-and-eff-condemn-arrest-tor-node-operator-dmitry-bogatov-russia https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/access-now-and-eff-con...
- nodja 8y agoIf you use tor and only visit onion sites, the sites don't know who visited them. If you use tor and visit the regular web sites (like, say, HN), the last computer that does the actual request to the website is an exit node, as far as that site is concerned, the exit node made the http request. If you run an exit node, your computer is going to be doing tons of requests to all kinds of websites, this may include sites that deal in illegal stuff like drugs, child prostitution, human trafficking, terrorism, etc. edit: Forgot to say, you must explicit be running an exit node. Not every tor node is an exit node.
- kbrackbill 8y agoYou can be arrested for running an exit node, because other Tor users' traffic will appear to be coming from you. For example: https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/05/01/russian-tor-exit-node-operator-arrested/ https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/05/01/russian-tor-exit-node-... https://www.zdnet.com/article/dan-egerstads-tor-exit-nodes-get-him-arrested-and-proves-a-point-i-made-in-july/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/dan-egerstads-tor-exit-nodes-g... https://www.pcworld.com/article/2452320/tor-exit-node-operator-convicted-of-abetting-spread-of-child-porn.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2452320/tor-exit-node-operat...
- jerheinze 8y agoAll of them from people running their exit from home, which has always been warned against.
- Lennie 8y agoI think Tor will get faster, now new protocols like TLS/1.3, HTTP/2 and QUIC are being developed. Currently Tor looks like HTTPS done with TLS/1.2 on TCP (like regular HTTPS). As these newer protocols get more and more delpoyed Tor can start using them too which will help make Tor faster.
- dimator 8y agoThose standards have nothing to do with Tor's speed.
- jerheinze 8y agoWell HTTP/2 is disabled in the Tor Browser (for now), and it has a positive impact on speed, so they do matter: https://bugs.torproject.org/14952 https://bugs.torproject.org/14952
- Ajedi32 8y agoTor circuits tend to be rather high latency, so anything that reduces the number of round trips needed for page loads is likely to have a significant impact on Tor's effective speed.
- AlyssaRowan 8y agoNot immediately, but I feel that as those protocols become more ubiquitous, _maybe_ the base Tor transport protocol (for nodes which aren't bridges) might be able to benefit from some of the same upgrades by using them? I don't know how much (if at all) it might help—but other, similar overlay networks have previously noticed that (intuitively) inefficiency in the transport protocol is likely to be (broadly speaking) multiplied by the number of hops; so any improvements in that might be useful in improving the user experience by using the same available resources more efficiently. What that might mean for Tor's perceived speed is a somewhat murky issue, as that's a function of the complex interaction of latency and bandwidth and crypto and routing overhead of all the involved nodes in a tunnel put together; which of course is also shared with other tunnels; not to mention it will _also_ be particularly affected by exit node outproxy bandwidth; _and_ any possible packet loss and delay caused by both incidental _and_ deliberate adverse network conditions…
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoTor is not that slow these days. Sometimes you get a bad circuit but you can reroute and expect speeds comparable to mobile phone networks.
- aseipp 8y agoIs it even worth talking about speed without at least considering client network conditions? A lot of people have poor internet connections, many places world-over are basically mobile-internet only already, shared internet spaces with variable QoS (campuses), etc etc. Most people aren't using engineer-priced laptops/workstations or backed by enterprise-grade routing equipment, after all.
- dbolgheroni 8y agoYes it is. I can't speak for everyone, but in Brazil, it's virtually impossible to use Tor even for HTML-only websites. And I can say most people have a slower bandwidth than I.
- mirimir 8y agoThis would be a privacy option for Firefox, not the default. But yes, Tor introduces latency and reduces bandwidth. For traffic to the open Internet, traffic uses circuits through three relays: entry guard, middle and exit. So there are four hops between users and websites, instead of one. The Earth's circumference is about 40 thousand km. So the longest path is arguably ~20 thousand km. And rtt for that would be about 300-500 msec, according to my measurements.[0] It's only ~130 msec at lightspeed, but there are some copper links, plus switching time and caching. So with four hops, rtt would at most be 1200-2000 msec, if every hop were the maximum length. In practice, rtt for Tor is at most half that, and often even less. But latency is actually good if your goal is anonymity. Because it reduces the accuracy of traffic analysis. With traditional onion sites, there are two three-relay circuits, one for the user and one for the site, plus a rendezvous relay. So rtt is much greater. However, sites can opt for one-relay circuits, sacrificing anonymity, so overall rtt isn't that bad. Bandwidth is also reduced with Tor. Increased latency is part of that. But also, many relays have low-bandwidth uplinks, especially ones that people run at home. The Tor client does pick faster relays, but there's a tradeoff, in that doing so reduces anonymity. Increased investment in high-bandwidth relays would help a lot. Also, with more relays, it would be workable to implement multipath circuits. Especially for onion sites, where precious exit relays aren't needed. Using MPTCP, I managed ~50 Mbps throughput for bbcp transfers between onion sites (with gigabit uplinks).[1] I was getting ~36 subflows per tcp connection. 0) https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-verify-physical-locations-of-internet-servers https://www.ivpn.net/privacy-guides/how-to-verify-physical-l... 1) https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUDV2KHrAgs84oUc7z9zQmZ3whx1NB6YDPv8ZRuf4dutN/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmUDV2KHrAgs84oUc7z9zQmZ3whx1NB6YDPv8ZR...
- ngold 8y agoSo basically satellite Internet speeds. That is pretty good.
- petra 8y agoThey need to solve the issue of speed, altough maybe for sensitive queries(assuming that's enough, a very big assumption,), people may be willing to use a slow "super private browsing mode". another option is to make people pay for faster speeds ? And if i recall correctly, a "global passive attacker" listening to internet traffic around can de-anonimize TOR using ML. Seems like something that would be possible and profitable for a Google and internet infra companies.
- ComodoHacker 8y ago>another option is to make people pay for faster speeds This is what Telegram is trying to acheive with their TON and Gram.
- jerheinze 8y agoGoogle isn't a GPA. Also having a low-latency anonymity system that isn't affected by a GPA is an open problem. The important thing here is that using Tor is better than not.
- cup-of-tea 8y ago> what WhatsApp did with E2E encryption Convince everyone that using a closed source, proprietary app is good security?
- jacekm 8y agoWhatsApp is not perfect and certainly its code not being available for inspection is one of its flaws. However, it did bring security to the masses. I mean I am pretty sure the security it offers is enough for 95% of people. I would not use it for sending documents stolen from NSA, but for the rest of cases - it gets you covered. Security very often need to be balanced with convenience - with WhatsApp you get immense boost of protection without sacrificing much convenience. One could argue, that you could get better security with Signal - true, but first you'd need to convince all your family and friends to install it.
- tinus_hn 8y agoYou also get encryption while your traffic looks just the same as everybody else’s. You don’t stand out like when you’re using Tor.
- jerheinze 8y ago> You also get encryption while your traffic looks just the same as everybody else’s. You don’t stand out like when you’re using Tor. Detecting WhatsApp usage is trivial. With Tor you can use pluggable transports to obfuscate your traffic.
- Spooky23 8y agoLikely actual result: Firefox will become increasingly irrelevant. If Tor is going to be a built-in feature of Firefox, most employers are going to flag it as malware. This is a ridiculously dumb thing on so many levels -- promote privacy by directing your network traffic to "volunteer" proxy services?
- unimpressive 8y agoIt's been my understanding that Firefox has been soft splitting its consumer and business versions of the product for a while. This would presumably just be another step down that road.
- m-p-3 8y agoMost businesses deploy Firefox ESR, so I wouldn't be surprised if they omit the Tor capabilities in that version.
- sp332 8y agoYou already don't know what proxies your traffic is going through. Using Tor might increase the odds of a bad actor a bit but end-to-end security is something the web is getting better at right now.
- Spooky23 8y agoThe risk now is that some bad actor is replacing TLS certificates, which is an uncommon and tamper-evident event. Tor is handing your traffic to an unknown 3rd party. Plus, users do not understand what Tor is or how to use it. Fighting political battles with software is dumb — the end result is going to be a permanent loss of freedom, as governments force the use of platforms with trusted app stores.
- sp332 8y agoThe risk now is BGP hijacking. Or really just normal operation of BGP. You data could go anywhere on the planet on its way to the destination and you're not going to know ahead of time what path any particular packet will take. If you're using TLS, it doesn't matter so much if the exit node is malicious because they still won't be able to read it.