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Yes, a more secure and practical alternative to "VPN services" is the Tor network, which externalizes the cost of infrastructure to volunteers and thus reduces
by oil25 7y ago
Yes, a more secure and practical alternative to "VPN services" is the Tor network, which externalizes the cost of infrastructure to volunteers and thus reduces the risk inherent with centralized control. While Tor is also not without risk, I really wish more privacy oriented services and software had decentralization as a core tenet of their design.
- lighthazard 7y agoTor has a terrible user experience though. You can't just browse without bandwidth woes.
- metildaa 7y agoI can load YouTube just fine over Tor
- colemickens 7y agoWhy is this downvoted? It took less than 30 seconds to fire up Orbot, connect, open YouTube and start streaming a video without any issue or fuss. Sometimes when people talk about Tor, it reminds me of how people talked about Linux up until a couple years ago - often touting very out-dated impressions as if they were current observations. Tor bandwidth is very different than it was 5-10 years ago.
- viraptor 7y agoIt's not very consistent. Sometimes you get a gateway which is great, sometimes one which is limited to 10kbps, sometimes one running some monitoring experiments which doesn't care if you get any bandwidth (I was running one for a while).
- colemickens 7y agoMy understanding is that bad/poor gateways are penalized. In my own experience, I've only ever needed to change circuits manually once (but I'm primarily using Tor to NAT punch to hidden services, not sure if that matters ).
- bauerd 7y agoDidn't downvote, still >30 seconds for getting a video playing isn't super convincing. That's far too slow for everyday use, at least for me
- colemickens 7y agoWhile I said less than 30 seconds, it really was about 10 seconds but I didn't want to sound like I was exaggerating. And that was of course including switching apps, the initial Tor connection, switching apps back, waiting for my feed to load, clicking a video. I just tried again, it took 6 seconds to open Orbot and completely connect to Tor. The rest was business as usual. Maybe a 1, 1.5 second delay getting to YouTube and for the video to start playback. For what Tor offers, that is impressive, and I don't know what could possibly be convincing beyond that point. Not to mention that one can just leave Orbot running as well. And since I'm on Android, I can opt to have specific app traffic sent through Tor, or Orbot can act as a system-wide VPN. I'd make a video showing how painless it is, but setting it up, recording and uploading would take a hundredfold more time than just trying it out. edit: I know that it's purely anecdotal, but I just enabled Orbot VPN mode and fired up "Speedtest". It is reporting 7Mbps and 3.65Mbps up. It's not great, but to me that is usable if your privacy needs outweigh need for speed. And a screenshot if it's of interest, you can see that it's in VPN mode and Orbot is running: https://i.imgur.com/UZu4aJs.png https://i.imgur.com/UZu4aJs.png edit2: yikes, I actually just backed up 29 full-resolution screenshots to my Google Photos account without even realizing Orbot was still connected. Convinces me!
- jammygit 7y agoI just get captchas
- tootahe45 7y agoWhy does it need to be one or the other? why not both?
- badrabbit 7y agoYou trust Tor exit nodes over vpn providers?
- ubercow13 7y agoIs there any need to trust Tor exit nodes at all?
- detaro 7y agoIs all traffic you send across them secured in a way that the exit node can't do anything bad to it? (Tor exit nodes have been caught injecting malware into binaries downloaded over HTTP through them, for one possible problem if it isn't)
- oil25 7y ago> Tor exit nodes have been caught injecting malware into binaries downloaded over HTTP through them It's more accurate to say bad actors have been injecting malware into HTTP-downloaded binaries. Some of these bad actors use Tor exit nodes, some use free WiFi hotspots, and some run their own VPN services. Framing this as a Tor problem is like blaming violence on weapons instead of the perpetrators.
- badrabbit 7y agoIf you block non-tls traffic period and you never click through on invalid cert sites the only concern is 0day exploits. As much as https is popupar there is still alot of plain http sites and sites that upgrade to https after the first request. Data collection and running JS in your browser aside,there are clever tricks used to track and possibly deanonymize youand obviously they are hostile when it comes to exploutation. At least VPN providers need your money and their reputation and you can chain them for tor like privacy without the poor performance and anonymity.
- oil25 7y agoSure, I do. TLS provides end-to-end encryption and sites which don't support it are not allowed to run Javascript in my browser.