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> onion routing to exit nodes on the internet has diminishing efficacy How about onion routing to peers? Tor provides a great backbone to do this yet so few ap

> onion routing to exit nodes on the internet has diminishing efficacy How about onion routing to peers? Tor provides a great backbone to do this yet so few applications employ it. I have ideas of course, but in general, it's very easy to have a desktop app on your home computer that fires up an onion service you can access from anywhere including mobile. Why more apps that don't have high bandwidth requirements don't use it I'll never know.

nyolfen 8y ago
a big a-ha moment for me was understanding tor’s simple utility for punching through nat. it really has a lot of cool uses beyond the usual
- kodablah 8y ago
  Yup. Here's a few Go lines to serve a dir over http via an onion service: https://github.com/cretz/bine#example https://github.com/cretz/bine#example. Takes a few seconds to setup the service or even less if you set the option to use v3 onion services. Client auth can be configured and it's part of the protocol. Fire it up and serve your at-home photo catalog and view it via something like Orfox on your mobile device.
  - SahAssar 8y ago
    > "a few Go lines" That makes it sound like it is simple, but without looking at the dependencies code it might just be a simple interface to a implementation of a complex protocol.
    - kodablah 8y ago
      Well, sure. That goes with everything, you aren't implementing your own TCP stack for making a simple HTTP server response. The claimed simplicity is in dev time, not in protocol implementation for all layers.
      - SahAssar 8y ago
        Sure, but "tor’s simple utility for punching through nat" (although said by the parent and only agreed by you) makes it sound like NAT hole punching is now simple, universal and stable. If it is all those three via TOR's utility I'd love it, but I'm guessing it is neither or just one.
        kodablah 8y ago
        > If it is all those three via TOR's utility I'd love it, but I'm guessing it is neither or just one. It is all three, but it's not technical NAT hole punching as much as just connecting to relays. So any device that can call out to the internet can setup a local onion service, similar to how those localhost-to-public-address dev tunnels work.
adrianN 8y ago
Tor could be the future protocol of the Internet of Things if big corporations wouldn't want to sell all your data. https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Internet%20of%20Onion%20Things.pdf https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Inte...
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > Tor could be the future protocol of the Internet of Things if big corporations wouldn't want to sell all your data I tried to use the Tor browser. The problem isn't "big corporations" but speed, latency and my MacBook fans spinning when I try to read the newspaper.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zrm 8y ago
    Are you sure that last one isn't the newspaper website itself? They're notorious for that and it would be surprising if you could actually push enough traffic (maybe ~1Gbps sustained?) through a Tor circuit to max out even one core on Tor itself.
    - colejohnson66 8y ago
      Or Bitcoin mining...
jstarfish 8y ago
Isn't this basically Hola/Luminati's networking model?

nyolfen 8y ago

a big a-ha moment for me was understanding tor’s simple utility for punching through nat. it really has a lot of cool uses beyond the usual

kodablah 8y ago
Yup. Here's a few Go lines to serve a dir over http via an onion service: https://github.com/cretz/bine#example https://github.com/cretz/bine#example. Takes a few seconds to setup the service or even less if you set the option to use v3 onion services. Client auth can be configured and it's part of the protocol. Fire it up and serve your at-home photo catalog and view it via something like Orfox on your mobile device.
- SahAssar 8y ago
  > "a few Go lines" That makes it sound like it is simple, but without looking at the dependencies code it might just be a simple interface to a implementation of a complex protocol.
  - kodablah 8y ago
    Well, sure. That goes with everything, you aren't implementing your own TCP stack for making a simple HTTP server response. The claimed simplicity is in dev time, not in protocol implementation for all layers.
    - SahAssar 8y ago
      Sure, but "tor’s simple utility for punching through nat" (although said by the parent and only agreed by you) makes it sound like NAT hole punching is now simple, universal and stable. If it is all those three via TOR's utility I'd love it, but I'm guessing it is neither or just one.
      - kodablah 8y ago
        > If it is all those three via TOR's utility I'd love it, but I'm guessing it is neither or just one. It is all three, but it's not technical NAT hole punching as much as just connecting to relays. So any device that can call out to the internet can setup a local onion service, similar to how those localhost-to-public-address dev tunnels work.

adrianN 8y ago

Tor could be the future protocol of the Internet of Things if big corporations wouldn't want to sell all your data. https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Internet%20of%20Onion%20Things.pdf https://github.com/n8fr8/talks/blob/master/onion_things/Inte...

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> Tor could be the future protocol of the Internet of Things if big corporations wouldn't want to sell all your data I tried to use the Tor browser. The problem isn't "big corporations" but speed, latency and my MacBook fans spinning when I try to read the newspaper.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- zrm 8y ago
  Are you sure that last one isn't the newspaper website itself? They're notorious for that and it would be surprising if you could actually push enough traffic (maybe ~1Gbps sustained?) through a Tor circuit to max out even one core on Tor itself.
  - colejohnson66 8y ago
    Or Bitcoin mining...

jstarfish 8y ago

Isn't this basically Hola/Luminati's networking model?