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First of all, it’s hidden sevices, not dark web. Second, to anyone crawling hidden services or crawling over tor, please run a relay or decrease your hop. Don’
by bureaucrat 7y ago
First of all, it’s hidden sevices, not dark web.
Second, to anyone crawling hidden services or crawling over tor, please run a relay or decrease your hop. Don’t sacrifice other’s desperate need for anonymity for your $whatever_purpose_thats_probably_not_important. It could be some fun thing to do for you, but some people are relying on tor to use the free, secure and anonymous Internet.
- buildbuildbuild 7y agoA polite suggestion, but this is not currently possible. The Tor Project recently added a consensus flag which can globally disable single hop client connections as a DDoS mitigation approach. It is currently enabled. (DoSRefuseSingleHopClientRendezvous)
- tgragnato 7y agoIf I were to judge by the statistics of the heartbeat messages I have access to.. The number of people trying to create one-hop circuits is huge.
- malux85 7y ago> First of all, it’s hidden sevices, not dark web For the uninitiated, can you please explain the differences in what they are and how they're accessed?
- creekorful 7y agoAuthor here. The differences are explained in the post. The dark web is a vast groups of services that cannot be accessed without using special software / proxy. The hidden services are service running on the TOR network and accessed using a browser that use the TOR proxy. They are a type of dark web services, but not the entirety
- sandworm101 7y agoIt's now just "Tor" and when accessing hidden services it isnt really a proxy. The Onion Router acronym went away back with the vidalia proxy. But i do miss the oldschool torbutton. It was fun.
- creekorful 7y agothe proxy which I refer is the local SOCKS proxy used by tor browser / your applications to be routed through the network.
- malux85 7y agoThank you. > The dark web is a vast groups of services that cannot be accessed without using special software / proxy. Can you name a few for examples?
- xtracto 7y ago> The dark web is a vast groups of services that cannot be accessed without using special software This takes me to the 1990's.... "groups of services that cannot be accessed without using special software" definitely matches NNTP, FTP, SMTP, SSH, HTTP, etc.
- blaser-waffle 7y agohell I still have servers that won't do anything for me without https:// https://
- technomalogical 7y agogopher://
- fs111 7y agohttps://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services
- jstanley 7y agoActually, the opposite is true. People who actually need anonymity need to hide among traffic that is boring. If you reduce the number of hops your crawler is using, you're reducing the amount of boring traffic and making it easier to find the interesting people. Running a relay in addition to using Tor in the normal way is a good idea, however, as it increases the bandwidth of the network.
- sandworm101 7y agoThere is plenty of traffic in which to hide already. Another bot making and breaking random connections 24/7 is of no additional help.
- jstanley 7y agoFor one project, I agree, it makes no difference. But if the received wisdom becomes "if you're not rebelling against an oppressive regime, you should only be using 1 hop" then the advice has real harmful effects.
- clashmeifyoucan 7y agoIn fact it is a bit more severe than that as you are effectively deanonymizing yourself. If everyone else is using a 3-hop circuit but your crawler is using just 2 hops, it wouldn't take much effort to isolate your activity in the network since you're effectively standing out.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- alufers 7y agoI am no TOR expert, but how does decreasing the amount of hops or running your own relay decrease the privacy of other people?
- PeterisP 7y agoRunning large requests over many hops takes up limited Tor resources so it makes using Tor slower/harder for other people. Decreasing the amount of hops means that you use less resources, running your own relay means that you provide resources to others.
- pests 7y agoI don't think the other reply you got answered your question. The thought is that other people are hiding in your noise. Make less noise, other people stand out more.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Myrmornis 7y agoMust one rely on appeals such as this (i.e. a cultural solution) or does tor have a technological solution to the problem you're describing?
- bureaucrat 7y agoThey tried to enforce users to become a relay when using as a client but relays should be stable servers so the plan was dismissed.
- kerkeslager 7y agoCould you explain why relays should be stable servers?
- bureaucrat 7y agoSimple. Imagine you are using tor and one of the relay has problems(unstable, high latency or packet loss). You don’t know which of the 3 hops failed. We have no option but to build a new circuit and we don’t want that. That’s why tor needs stable, trustworthy relays. From tor blog: A new relay, assuming it is reliable and has plenty of bandwidth, goes through four phases: the unmeasured phase (days 0-3) where it gets roughly no use, the remote-measurement phase (days 3-8) where load starts to increase, the ramp-up guard phase (days 8-68) where load counterintuitively drops and then rises higher, and the steady-state guard phase (days 68+). https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-new-relay https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-new-relay
- kerkeslager 7y ago> We have no option but to build a new circuit and we don’t want that. That's true, you never want to rebuild the circuit. But it strikes me that the idea that this is avoidable falls into at least two of the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing[1], namely "The Network Is Reliable" and "Topology Doesn't Change". If we instead assume that the network isn't reliable, and topology does change, then instead of eliminating unreliable nodes and being conservative with changes to the topology, we would focus on reducing the costs of rebuilding a circuit so that network unreliability and topology changes aren't disastrous. But it sounds like the Tor team has instead decided to bolster these assumptions, to make them less of assumptions; trying to make the network as reliable as possible and trying to make the topology change as little as possible. I don't mean this to be a harsh criticism of the Tor team. I'm an outsider, and beyond an uncompromising privacy constraint, I don't know all the constraints Tor was built under. I'm sure the tradeoffs made by the Tor team make sense within the context of their constraints. Obviously, the Tor network works well enough to have a large user base, so they have provided a good-enough solution. But I wonder if changes could be made to Tor's design in the future which would allow quicker adding and removing nodes, and handle network reliability issues better, so that Tor would be faster. One possibility which stands out to me is to pool circuits and load-balance between them, so that if a circuit begins to have issues, you still are connected along other circuits while you build a new circuit to replace the unreliable one. This possibly would run into issues where correlate could correlate traffic from different circuits to unmask clients, so you'd have to be careful, but I'm not sure these problems would be insurmountable. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_computing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_distributed_compu...
- vectorEQ 7y agoi just like how 'dark web' turned into 'Tor' at some point :'). there's tons of others... :s guess ppl forgot
- johnfactorial 7y agoA short list of those tons would be wonderfully helpful to share. :)
- clashmeifyoucan 7y agoActually, the official term is Onion Services (https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.html.en https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/onion-services.html.en check out the first paragraph)
- bureaucrat 7y agoIt seems that they changed the name from hidden service to onion service.
- clashmeifyoucan 7y agoThat is correct. Tor Project has really struggled with negative connotations in the media with the so called "dark web" so I believe the terminology does play a part.
- rolltiide 7y agowow news to me, wonder how long that will take to catch on onion like "layered" services
- MuffinFlavored 7y ago> other’s desperate need for anonymity Can somebody list some positive, legitimate, not illegal uses to desperately be anonymous?
- goda90 7y agoThe "not illegal" part is the catch here. Something can be illegal but still legitimate if the laws are illegitimate. Someone trying to exercise freedom of speech or the press under an oppressive regime would need anonymity to avoid being jailed or killed.
- metamet 7y agoI think this is an important cultural reframing that needs to occur, sooner rather than later. Most people, when they hear of things like "the dark web" and cryptocurrency think about the massively publicized instances of drug trafficking and ordering a hit on someone. It's going to take a lot of work to reframe the utility and purpose of them to a more universal, humanitarian angle. People in this world live in oppressive circumstances. This should be viewed as a step toward helping them not be systemically silenced.
- SkyBelow 7y agoUnder the idea of legitimate and illegitimate use, why wouldn't drug trafficking be legitimate? It gets drugs off the streets, decreases violence compare to street level drug dealing, increases safety (while the reputation of online sellers isn't a great metric, we are talking relative to the person on the street corner), and generally involves only adults. If one is willing to argue that the US government throwing someone in a cage because the grew or bought the wrong plant is legitimate, then I don't see how they have any standing to complain about China doing something for someone who held up the wrong sign at a protest.
- metamet 7y agoI suspect that since illicit drug trafficking has a strong social stigma, it may not be the best thing to lead with. It can, however, be discussed with nuance in a way that could change minds. I definitely think there's a lot of legitimacy to what you're saying. Reminds me a bit of what you see with how some societies approach drug addiction. Providing a safe space with clean needles vs throwing in a prison. There's a lot to think about. And I think we've seen some of that with the marijuana legalization across the US. The state adoption had strong initial resistance, but public opinion began to shift once it got out of the shroud of stigma and moral enforcement.