5 ms·

Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running o

Tor is great, but it's always been a bit slow. Now that cryptocurrency is a thing, I often wonder if that problem could be solved by incentivizing the running of relays and exit nodes through microtransactions without compromising privacy. Would be great if we could make Tor fast enough that it could actually be used as a substitute for commercial VPNs.

Forbo 8y ago
In my experience, Tor runs about as well as ProtonVPN with their "Secure Core" option enabled (which adds routing through an additional hop located somewhere in the EU). Tor has pretty good throughput, I think the problem is the the additional latency that comes from routing through multiple nodes.
jstanley 8y ago
It's not too slow these days. I routinely browse over Tor, including watching YouTube videos, and it doesn't feel substantially different to just my ordinary ADSL connection.
kodablah 8y ago
Tor's slowness (often overstated) is more about hop count and geographic diversity than relay/exit node count.
blfr 8y ago
It has been getting faster lately, and I mean last couple of years. Or maybe my tolerance grew from using LTE but I'm pretty sure it has been getting faster.
conradev 8y ago
That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid: https://www.orchid.com/ https://www.orchid.com/
- kodablah 8y ago
  Is there more info about active development? That site doesn't say much. I found some GitHub repos that were last updated in the summer[0]. It's going to be unfortunate if they stay with AGPL. 0 - https://github.com/orchidsource https://github.com/orchidsource
  - saurik 8y ago
    (I am now in charge of technology at Orchid. None of that source code is relevant to our project. I am sorry for the confusion.) Can you explain why you are concerned with the usage of AGPL? Are you hoping to make a closed-source hosted fork eventually?
    - kodablah 8y ago
      > Can you explain why you are concerned with the usage of AGPL? Are you hoping to make a closed-source hosted fork eventually? This can get very copy-left philosophical very quickly, so I'll be brief. For transit technology, especially if adoption matters, the less a license infects downstream projects the better for ecosystem growth. For example, I have an open source Tor library that is MIT licensed and it statically links Tor. I want the world to use my library, commercial/closed and open alike. I would never be able to do that with Orchid and therefore would not touch the tech. Make what you build on your network AGPL, but the underpinnings themselves should be as restrictionless as possible. These are my opinions and I understand the other opinion of "if you want the right to use our stuff, you have to abide by our openness rules on your stuff" but just know that you are trading adoption for principles.
      - saurik 8y ago
        FWIW, you are in fact talking to a team of people who are core Free Software people (such as Brian Fox, who was the first person employed by the Free Software Foundation)... but like, it must be pointed out that your Tor library is almost certainly a client library, and the license of the Tor server you are accessing would not affect the ability for people to use it: "statically linking Tor" is kind of simplistic, as it assumes Tor is a monolithic component (and maybe it strangely is... I honestly have never looked much at its code). In case it helps immediately clarify: you absolutely will be able to use the Orchid platform to build commercial, closed source distributed, semi-distributed, and even centralized applications. For philosophical background on this, I encourage reading the position of Richard Stallman on why the Ogg Vorbis library should not be licensed under GPL. Our mission (to decentralize software and communication) causes similar quirks. https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 (Exactly what the boundaries are on the components and under what license they will be released is thereby not yet finalized as we continue to work on architecture, but there are at least a couple things we are building that will seriously be released under 0-BSD.)
arpstick 8y ago
That reminds me of this little onion routering thingy i made that spiraled out of control into a semi functioning project that I got hired to work on full time (https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network)
- neuroscr 8y ago
  Also a dev on loki-network, we have $4.1+ million USD so far invested in relays (and potentially exits). It's layer 3 (so think more like i2p) but newer crypto and much better latency. A good overview of the project is here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/docs/high-level.txt https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/doc... other docs here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/docs/ https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/doc... Join our test-net now: https://discord.gg/eB8k6xQ https://discord.gg/eB8k6xQ or #llarp on freenode

Forbo 8y ago

In my experience, Tor runs about as well as ProtonVPN with their "Secure Core" option enabled (which adds routing through an additional hop located somewhere in the EU). Tor has pretty good throughput, I think the problem is the the additional latency that comes from routing through multiple nodes.

jstanley 8y ago

It's not too slow these days. I routinely browse over Tor, including watching YouTube videos, and it doesn't feel substantially different to just my ordinary ADSL connection.

kodablah 8y ago

Tor's slowness (often overstated) is more about hop count and geographic diversity than relay/exit node count.

blfr 8y ago

It has been getting faster lately, and I mean last couple of years. Or maybe my tolerance grew from using LTE but I'm pretty sure it has been getting faster.

conradev 8y ago

That is being worked on! It’s called Orchid: https://www.orchid.com/ https://www.orchid.com/

kodablah 8y ago
Is there more info about active development? That site doesn't say much. I found some GitHub repos that were last updated in the summer[0]. It's going to be unfortunate if they stay with AGPL. 0 - https://github.com/orchidsource https://github.com/orchidsource
- saurik 8y ago
  (I am now in charge of technology at Orchid. None of that source code is relevant to our project. I am sorry for the confusion.) Can you explain why you are concerned with the usage of AGPL? Are you hoping to make a closed-source hosted fork eventually?
  - kodablah 8y ago
    > Can you explain why you are concerned with the usage of AGPL? Are you hoping to make a closed-source hosted fork eventually? This can get very copy-left philosophical very quickly, so I'll be brief. For transit technology, especially if adoption matters, the less a license infects downstream projects the better for ecosystem growth. For example, I have an open source Tor library that is MIT licensed and it statically links Tor. I want the world to use my library, commercial/closed and open alike. I would never be able to do that with Orchid and therefore would not touch the tech. Make what you build on your network AGPL, but the underpinnings themselves should be as restrictionless as possible. These are my opinions and I understand the other opinion of "if you want the right to use our stuff, you have to abide by our openness rules on your stuff" but just know that you are trading adoption for principles.
    - saurik 8y ago
      FWIW, you are in fact talking to a team of people who are core Free Software people (such as Brian Fox, who was the first person employed by the Free Software Foundation)... but like, it must be pointed out that your Tor library is almost certainly a client library, and the license of the Tor server you are accessing would not affect the ability for people to use it: "statically linking Tor" is kind of simplistic, as it assumes Tor is a monolithic component (and maybe it strangely is... I honestly have never looked much at its code). In case it helps immediately clarify: you absolutely will be able to use the Orchid platform to build commercial, closed source distributed, semi-distributed, and even centralized applications. For philosophical background on this, I encourage reading the position of Richard Stallman on why the Ogg Vorbis library should not be licensed under GPL. Our mission (to decentralize software and communication) causes similar quirks. https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 https://lwn.net/2001/0301/a/rms-ov-license.php3 (Exactly what the boundaries are on the components and under what license they will be released is thereby not yet finalized as we continue to work on architecture, but there are at least a couple things we are building that will seriously be released under 0-BSD.)

arpstick 8y ago

That reminds me of this little onion routering thingy i made that spiraled out of control into a semi functioning project that I got hired to work on full time (https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network)

neuroscr 8y ago
Also a dev on loki-network, we have $4.1+ million USD so far invested in relays (and potentially exits). It's layer 3 (so think more like i2p) but newer crypto and much better latency. A good overview of the project is here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/docs/high-level.txt https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/doc... other docs here: https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/docs/ https://github.com/loki-project/loki-network/blob/master/doc... Join our test-net now: https://discord.gg/eB8k6xQ https://discord.gg/eB8k6xQ or #llarp on freenode