26 ms·

The German Problem with Tor

144 points by worldofmatthew 6y ago

Havoc 6y ago
Why all the hate for Germany specifically? Pretty much no gov out there likes TOR nodes. The fact that there are ton in Germany any seems like something that should be applauded
- notRobot 6y ago
  > The high number of high-speed relays and exits in Germany mean that it is not too uncommon to get both a German guard and exit. This gives the state an easier time if they want to target someone using traffic correlation attacks. > That also does not take in account the planned German law that will allow authorities to redirect traffic to state-owned servers, to infect users with viruses/Trojans. This is especially a concern for third-world users of Tor who are going to mainly accessing non-HTTPS sites on a computer without the best security. Did you read the article in its entirety?
  - teh_klev 6y ago
    I think you could have phrased your question better: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
    - notRobot 6y ago
      My bad. I chose the wording I used over "Did you even read the article?" to be more polite, but perhaps I should have phrased it in a completely different way altogether. I'll keep it in mind I'm the future.
  - Havoc 6y ago
    Yes I did read it > not too uncommon to get both a German guard and exit. The solution here is more non-German nodes not to shit on the Germans that are already hosting lots. Maybe there is a language barrier at play here but just seems bizarre how aggressively “the German” is being singled out: >the German will give itself as many powers as it can to spy on its own citizens and those abroad.
    - jand 6y ago
      Maybe this is because of the visibility. If your security legislation is often declared partly illegal by the Verfassungsgericht (latest [1]), you leave the impression of reaching too far by default. If your courts do not declare (too far reaching) laws illegal, you leave the impression to have been right in your demands. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/world/europe/germany-privacy-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/world/europe/germany-priv...
      - imtringued 6y ago
        Is your argument that strict controls makes corruption appear more prevalent than it is in reality? Here is a different way to think about it. You are a police officer and interrogate 100 honest people who never lie and 25 people confess their crimes and the rest are innocent. Then you interrogate 100 people who always lie (75 are innocent) and you can only prove 15 of them guilty. From the outside it looks like honest people have a higher chance to be criminals. Doing the right thing can destroy your reputation.
- totalZero 6y ago
  Germany is an interesting case for TOR. I did some statistical analysis on TOR data (they publish a lot of data) from around when Snowden made his revelations, and many countries saw increased TOR activity while German activity went down versus the trend. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head (have them in a PDF somewhere) but my theory is that Germany doubted the security of TOR at that time. Maybe the intermittent crackdowns on TOR in Germany are based on a mistrust of the project's security/integrity, rather than simply an effort to keep internet traffic out in the open.
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    Are you certain that what you saw wasn't just the result of traffic being distributed between a higher number of exit nodes? Did the absolute number of available nodes in Germany change?
    - totalZero 6y ago
      https://metrics.torproject.org/ https://metrics.torproject.org/ The data are a bit richer and more granular than that, albeit imperfect. Take a look for yourself.
- rsync 6y ago
  "Why all the hate for Germany specifically? Pretty much no gov out there likes TOR nodes." It could be argued that the United States does like TOR nodes ... it was originally a US Navy research and development project and, then, in later years the US state department specifically called out TOR as a useful tool (during the "Arab Spring" protests, IIRC.) I see that even now, in 2020, the US State Department is a financial backer of TOR.[1] If I were running TOR nodes in the United States (as I have in the past) I would rely on that current funding as a positive defense against any legal claims against me. (I would also not do anything stupid like run TOR nodes from my home Internet) [1] https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/
elchin 6y ago
"In reality, the German government has a double standard when it comes to the right to privacy. They will fully support that right if it's company's violating your privacy (especially, if they are American because protectionism) but in contrast, the German will give itself as many powers as it can to spy on its own citizens and those abroad." This.
- duxup 6y ago
  Isn't that government by default? We carve out privacy exceptions for law enforcement in given situations where otherwise we would expect them to be respected.
- _Microft 6y ago
  That's only double standards if one considers states and companies as being in the same position. A state and a company have vastly different goals. A state should care for its citizens, this includes protections against threats to public safety (terror, organized crime) and surveillance is a tool in the box for that. A company on the other hand, would have no issues fleecing people and abusing their power for profit if they only could. States are the entities actually powerful enough to keep companies in check and I'm pretty happy when they do that. I admit that this is a, I guess, pretty european view of things (i.e. govs are good, since they keep greedy companies in check), while the american view might rather be that govs are bad because they get into the way of companies (which are considered good).
  - terminalcommand 6y ago
    In many places in the world, the government is corrupt and there is no transparency. I’d be surprised if people trust their governments in Poland, Bulgaria etc. Government officials have more power to abuse people than companies. At least Germany has an established constitutional court that can still resist the politicians to some degree. I think the american view is that governments are bad because they can be used to establish tyranny. Every citizen’s right to be judged by their own peers, their right to carry firearms and freedom of speech are the things that allow people to fight against corrupt governments. This is my view being someone living in Turkey. I am even afraid of posting this comment. Maybe this generation in Europe trusts their government and thinks that its good. But I bet people having experienced autocratic regimes can never trust their government.
cookiengineer 6y ago
Recommending to host an exit node in Switzerland in the context of TOR feels like reading an article of someone who thinks they are anonymous by using TOR. Switzerland is even more privacy invasive than German laws, and that is the case since 2010 when automated connection tagging was introduced for VND and VÜPF.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  I wasn't aware of that :( Which country would be best in your opinion? It seems it's becoming quite hard to find one that doesn't do this now.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    There are none. Full stop. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just delusional.
    - rhn_mk1 6y ago
      This is a useless reply. There is no black and white, and the parent is asking about the shades of graay.
      - qayxc 6y ago
        There are no shades of grey here - state actors have access to every internet node, fibre optic cables, operating systems and hardware. So unless you take your time to build your own CPU, main board and modem and only use our own private direct fibre connection, you're a potential target for being spied on. It's as simple as that. You can make things harder by encrypting your traffic, but that's possible regardless of were your Tor relay is located at. And even then some crypto algos are known to have been deliberately weakened by intelligence agencies so you best be a crypto expert as well if you're really that paranoid. The irony is that most (not all!) people who are ever so concerned about these things still use their smartphones (even though EVERY GSM/UMTS/4G protocol has been hacked at this point and is thus insecure), use cloud computing (either directly or indirectly via 3rd party services like Uber) and post on social networks. The only computer that is safe from attacks is not connected to any network and only ever used in a windowless room surrounded by reinforced concrete walls. The only information that is truly private is information you don't share in the first place.
mschuster91 6y ago
German here. Let's just say our population, especially the nerds, is way more competent than our Conservative governments of "internet printers" who have implemented the shit legislation that is the point of this article. Want to know names? Wolfgang Schaeuble, Thomas de Maiziere, Horst Seehofer. To the Germans on HN: Go to the elections, vote these morons out of office no matter if state or federal elections.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
0ld 6y ago
> you could get a VPS from a country who hates the western spy powers like Russia or Moldova nice try, comrade. but no
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  * that's "comrade Major" for you.
- raxxorrax 6y ago
  It is actually a great and most important tip. The Moldovan government would probably not share data with anyone having jurisdiction where you live. Maybe the Moldovan government will spy on you. It would be inconsequential if the info acquired is not interesting to an international market.
jupp0r 6y ago
Keep in mind that government IT jobs in Germany are almost comically underpaid. People competent enough to perform timing correlation attacks usually choose the >2x salary industry jobs. The running gag was that this is the greatest protection for citizens privacy. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence is that the government looks to shady companies like Gamma to do its job. This leads to FinFisher, which is normally used by the most contemptible dictatorships against their dissidents, to be used against German law enforcement. It also creates incentives not to prosecute Gamma for helping to violate human rights all over the world by helping to throw bloggers into torture jails.
- Kalium 6y ago
  > to be used against German law enforcement. Against, or by? I'm not trying to nitpick, just make sense of this. You imply that the German government hired Gamma to gain access to FinFisher, and then talk about it being used against German law enforcement. This seems internally inconsistent.
  - black_puppydog 6y ago
    "By" I'd suspect a writing/editing mistake here. But nobody is spying on our law enforcement. In fact, they seem to be so confident that anytime someone does look into their affairs for whatever reason, unconstitutional attitudes and practices just show up all over the place.
  - jupp0r 6y ago
    I meant “by”, sorry for the confusion.
LeanderK 6y ago
While I don't want to defend the german state, i think it should be mentioned that germany does have a pretty active pro-privacy movement. The chaos-computer club is big, with local chapters in nearly every city, very well connected and closely follows any movement from our government (and industry). While the german state itself may want as much control as possible, its attempts are always attacked by those groups.
- gmueckl 6y ago
  These aren't attacks, just protests that are sometimes big enough to be mentioned in mainstream media to then be summarily dimissed by politicians, sometimes in very condescending tones or even derogatory language. The actual impact on the lawmaking process is negligible. Politicians have figured out that ignoring protests of privacy advocates is "safe", that is, it won't affect their reelection. Suing against the legislation in the constitutional court is somewhat more effective, but it takes somewhere between 5 to 10 years to obtain a ruling againt a law that must be in effect before the process can even start.
  - asimovfan 6y ago
    If those attacks are completely negligable, was it the progressiveness and open mindedness of politicians that brought us to this point in history in terms of civil rights etc?
    - gmueckl 6y ago
      It was Hitler and Stalin. The Federal Republic of Germany was set up to have a constitution with very strong protections of individual freedom and democracy in response to the highjacking of the Weimar Republic constitution by the NSDAP. That state then evolved into a counterexample to German Democratic Republic while slowly gaining more and more independence from the Allied oversight that was put in place initially. There is a strong framework of rights and freedoms into the constitution as a legacy of these formation years. The main power that keeps that in place is the constitutional court with its long history of landmark decisions and a general tendency to overturn the steady trickle of new legislation that seeks to limit personal rights, mostly in the guise of better prosecution of crimes. For example, the right to control the use of one's own data is a result of ruling of that court. No lawmaker would have come up with that.
LockAndLol 6y ago
> Now you know how the Germans hate privacy, you will almost certainly be asking about alternative locations. I don't know where this guy comes from but this has to be the most sensationalist sentence in that blog post. It's on par with "non Americans hate freedom". If Germans hated privacy, why would they be the biggest bandwidth contributors to the TOR network? Not sure the author was using all of his brain when he wrote that blog post.
- chickenpotpie 6y ago
  Devils advocate: if you hate tor you should try to contribute to the network as much as possible. The more you control it, the more you can exploit it when vulnerabilities are found.
  - luckylion 6y ago
    It's not the German government though, it's individuals and private pro-privacy organizations that provide the nodes. Among them are some that the blog post mentioned because they were targeted by law enforcement.
  - Sebb767 6y ago
    That's the equivalent of saying if you want Microsoft to fail, buy all their products in the hope that they get too big and inefficient and therefore fail. Sure, more control helps, but you need quite a lot and it would be prohibitively expensive at the moment (and also noticeable).
luckylion 6y ago
> The high number of high-speed relays and exits in Germany mean that it is not too uncommon to get both a German guard and exit. This gives the state an easier time if they want to target someone using traffic correlation attacks. No, it doesn't. They'd need to control those computers, and they don't, do they? Because if they do, then "move your exit node somewhere else" won't help, because "you" are the state. And if they don't, no, I don't believe it's feasible for them to look at raw traffic (e.g. on the datacenter level) for two nodes in Germany and correlate individual data streams that may or may not be from one TOR connection. > That also does not take in account the planned German law that will allow authorities to redirect traffic to state-owned servers, to infect users with viruses/Trojans. They'd have to control the server though. They can't just decree that all TOR traffic must now be routed through their malicious endpoint. The laws are targeting ISPs and service providers and are for individual cases (i.e. "we know who's on the line") not for mass-infection, and will require a court order. They could do the individual surveillance with court order previously, what's new is that the provider can be forced to cooperate and proxy the traffic. It's still not applicable to TOR because it's not one large provider, and you can generally not say who's on the line.
kleton 6y ago
Off-topic, but what is the current state of tor onion (hidden) services? Are they easy to de-anonymize?
- Cantbekhan 6y ago
  There are certainly plenty of black markets thriving on onion services. Some have been online and serving for quite a few years. They seem fine. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818727
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
I ran an exit node about a decade ago. There are no freedom-fighting journalists in repressed countries using TOR. There are only pornographers, BitTorrent users, crypto-haxxing "Z3r0cools" who use it to feel like they are doing something crypto-haxxy, and botnet command and controllers. Countries in which TOR will be useful treat TOR users as de-facto criminals or block it altogether. Using TOR in a totalitarian state (and it is easily detectable) is worse than speaking out against the state. Countries in which TOR is not needed are full of crypto-haxxing "Z3r0cools" who think they are actually helping someone by promoting TOR. When you mention that TOR was an experiment-- one that failed-- to shield spies from foreign governments that crypto-haxxing Z3r0cools co-opted you get scorn. When you point out that TOR fails in its primary purpose: non-attributable access to information or communications in totalitarian regimes you get scorn. There is no space for criticism of TOR which makes it not a product or technology but a religion-like ideology.
- john-shaffer 6y ago
  > When you point out that TOR fails in its primary purpose: non-attributable access to information or communications in totalitarian regimes you get scorn. It's my understanding that the subjects of totalitarian regimes use software such as Ultrasurf [1], and not TOR. I agree that TOR is not very useful in practice, but it seems misleading to state that without mentioning the success of the alternatives. [1] https://ultrasurf.us/ https://ultrasurf.us/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bar00000n 6y ago
When you use tor you are just another coward and a thief. Or a kiddo ashamed that he is jerking off to porn. so relax no one cares what you say in politics until you overcome your limitations. this is the right label for tor users.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Why all the hate for Germany specifically? Pretty much no gov out there likes TOR nodes. The fact that there are ton in Germany any seems like something that should be applauded

notRobot 6y ago
> The high number of high-speed relays and exits in Germany mean that it is not too uncommon to get both a German guard and exit. This gives the state an easier time if they want to target someone using traffic correlation attacks. > That also does not take in account the planned German law that will allow authorities to redirect traffic to state-owned servers, to infect users with viruses/Trojans. This is especially a concern for third-world users of Tor who are going to mainly accessing non-HTTPS sites on a computer without the best security. Did you read the article in its entirety?
- teh_klev 6y ago
  I think you could have phrased your question better: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
  - notRobot 6y ago
    My bad. I chose the wording I used over "Did you even read the article?" to be more polite, but perhaps I should have phrased it in a completely different way altogether. I'll keep it in mind I'm the future.
- Havoc 6y ago
  Yes I did read it > not too uncommon to get both a German guard and exit. The solution here is more non-German nodes not to shit on the Germans that are already hosting lots. Maybe there is a language barrier at play here but just seems bizarre how aggressively “the German” is being singled out: >the German will give itself as many powers as it can to spy on its own citizens and those abroad.
  - jand 6y ago
    Maybe this is because of the visibility. If your security legislation is often declared partly illegal by the Verfassungsgericht (latest [1]), you leave the impression of reaching too far by default. If your courts do not declare (too far reaching) laws illegal, you leave the impression to have been right in your demands. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/world/europe/germany-privacy-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/world/europe/germany-priv...
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Is your argument that strict controls makes corruption appear more prevalent than it is in reality? Here is a different way to think about it. You are a police officer and interrogate 100 honest people who never lie and 25 people confess their crimes and the rest are innocent. Then you interrogate 100 people who always lie (75 are innocent) and you can only prove 15 of them guilty. From the outside it looks like honest people have a higher chance to be criminals. Doing the right thing can destroy your reputation.
totalZero 6y ago
Germany is an interesting case for TOR. I did some statistical analysis on TOR data (they publish a lot of data) from around when Snowden made his revelations, and many countries saw increased TOR activity while German activity went down versus the trend. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head (have them in a PDF somewhere) but my theory is that Germany doubted the security of TOR at that time. Maybe the intermittent crackdowns on TOR in Germany are based on a mistrust of the project's security/integrity, rather than simply an effort to keep internet traffic out in the open.
- gmueckl 6y ago
  Are you certain that what you saw wasn't just the result of traffic being distributed between a higher number of exit nodes? Did the absolute number of available nodes in Germany change?
  - totalZero 6y ago
    https://metrics.torproject.org/ https://metrics.torproject.org/ The data are a bit richer and more granular than that, albeit imperfect. Take a look for yourself.
rsync 6y ago
"Why all the hate for Germany specifically? Pretty much no gov out there likes TOR nodes." It could be argued that the United States does like TOR nodes ... it was originally a US Navy research and development project and, then, in later years the US state department specifically called out TOR as a useful tool (during the "Arab Spring" protests, IIRC.) I see that even now, in 2020, the US State Department is a financial backer of TOR.[1] If I were running TOR nodes in the United States (as I have in the past) I would rely on that current funding as a positive defense against any legal claims against me. (I would also not do anything stupid like run TOR nodes from my home Internet) [1] https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/ https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/

elchin 6y ago

"In reality, the German government has a double standard when it comes to the right to privacy. They will fully support that right if it's company's violating your privacy (especially, if they are American because protectionism) but in contrast, the German will give itself as many powers as it can to spy on its own citizens and those abroad." This.

duxup 6y ago
Isn't that government by default? We carve out privacy exceptions for law enforcement in given situations where otherwise we would expect them to be respected.
_Microft 6y ago
That's only double standards if one considers states and companies as being in the same position. A state and a company have vastly different goals. A state should care for its citizens, this includes protections against threats to public safety (terror, organized crime) and surveillance is a tool in the box for that. A company on the other hand, would have no issues fleecing people and abusing their power for profit if they only could. States are the entities actually powerful enough to keep companies in check and I'm pretty happy when they do that. I admit that this is a, I guess, pretty european view of things (i.e. govs are good, since they keep greedy companies in check), while the american view might rather be that govs are bad because they get into the way of companies (which are considered good).
- terminalcommand 6y ago
  In many places in the world, the government is corrupt and there is no transparency. I’d be surprised if people trust their governments in Poland, Bulgaria etc. Government officials have more power to abuse people than companies. At least Germany has an established constitutional court that can still resist the politicians to some degree. I think the american view is that governments are bad because they can be used to establish tyranny. Every citizen’s right to be judged by their own peers, their right to carry firearms and freedom of speech are the things that allow people to fight against corrupt governments. This is my view being someone living in Turkey. I am even afraid of posting this comment. Maybe this generation in Europe trusts their government and thinks that its good. But I bet people having experienced autocratic regimes can never trust their government.

cookiengineer 6y ago

Recommending to host an exit node in Switzerland in the context of TOR feels like reading an article of someone who thinks they are anonymous by using TOR. Switzerland is even more privacy invasive than German laws, and that is the case since 2010 when automated connection tagging was introduced for VND and VÜPF.

GekkePrutser 6y ago
I wasn't aware of that :( Which country would be best in your opinion? It seems it's becoming quite hard to find one that doesn't do this now.
- qayxc 6y ago
  There are none. Full stop. Anyone who thinks otherwise is just delusional.
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    This is a useless reply. There is no black and white, and the parent is asking about the shades of graay.
    - qayxc 6y ago
      There are no shades of grey here - state actors have access to every internet node, fibre optic cables, operating systems and hardware. So unless you take your time to build your own CPU, main board and modem and only use our own private direct fibre connection, you're a potential target for being spied on. It's as simple as that. You can make things harder by encrypting your traffic, but that's possible regardless of were your Tor relay is located at. And even then some crypto algos are known to have been deliberately weakened by intelligence agencies so you best be a crypto expert as well if you're really that paranoid. The irony is that most (not all!) people who are ever so concerned about these things still use their smartphones (even though EVERY GSM/UMTS/4G protocol has been hacked at this point and is thus insecure), use cloud computing (either directly or indirectly via 3rd party services like Uber) and post on social networks. The only computer that is safe from attacks is not connected to any network and only ever used in a windowless room surrounded by reinforced concrete walls. The only information that is truly private is information you don't share in the first place.

mschuster91 6y ago

German here. Let's just say our population, especially the nerds, is way more competent than our Conservative governments of "internet printers" who have implemented the shit legislation that is the point of this article. Want to know names? Wolfgang Schaeuble, Thomas de Maiziere, Horst Seehofer. To the Germans on HN: Go to the elections, vote these morons out of office no matter if state or federal elections.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

0ld 6y ago

> you could get a VPS from a country who hates the western spy powers like Russia or Moldova nice try, comrade. but no

Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
* that's "comrade Major" for you.
raxxorrax 6y ago
It is actually a great and most important tip. The Moldovan government would probably not share data with anyone having jurisdiction where you live. Maybe the Moldovan government will spy on you. It would be inconsequential if the info acquired is not interesting to an international market.

jupp0r 6y ago

Keep in mind that government IT jobs in Germany are almost comically underpaid. People competent enough to perform timing correlation attacks usually choose the >2x salary industry jobs. The running gag was that this is the greatest protection for citizens privacy. Unfortunately, an unintended consequence is that the government looks to shady companies like Gamma to do its job. This leads to FinFisher, which is normally used by the most contemptible dictatorships against their dissidents, to be used against German law enforcement. It also creates incentives not to prosecute Gamma for helping to violate human rights all over the world by helping to throw bloggers into torture jails.

Kalium 6y ago
> to be used against German law enforcement. Against, or by? I'm not trying to nitpick, just make sense of this. You imply that the German government hired Gamma to gain access to FinFisher, and then talk about it being used against German law enforcement. This seems internally inconsistent.
- black_puppydog 6y ago
  "By" I'd suspect a writing/editing mistake here. But nobody is spying on our law enforcement. In fact, they seem to be so confident that anytime someone does look into their affairs for whatever reason, unconstitutional attitudes and practices just show up all over the place.
- jupp0r 6y ago
  I meant “by”, sorry for the confusion.

LeanderK 6y ago

While I don't want to defend the german state, i think it should be mentioned that germany does have a pretty active pro-privacy movement. The chaos-computer club is big, with local chapters in nearly every city, very well connected and closely follows any movement from our government (and industry). While the german state itself may want as much control as possible, its attempts are always attacked by those groups.

gmueckl 6y ago
These aren't attacks, just protests that are sometimes big enough to be mentioned in mainstream media to then be summarily dimissed by politicians, sometimes in very condescending tones or even derogatory language. The actual impact on the lawmaking process is negligible. Politicians have figured out that ignoring protests of privacy advocates is "safe", that is, it won't affect their reelection. Suing against the legislation in the constitutional court is somewhat more effective, but it takes somewhere between 5 to 10 years to obtain a ruling againt a law that must be in effect before the process can even start.
- asimovfan 6y ago
  If those attacks are completely negligable, was it the progressiveness and open mindedness of politicians that brought us to this point in history in terms of civil rights etc?
  - gmueckl 6y ago
    It was Hitler and Stalin. The Federal Republic of Germany was set up to have a constitution with very strong protections of individual freedom and democracy in response to the highjacking of the Weimar Republic constitution by the NSDAP. That state then evolved into a counterexample to German Democratic Republic while slowly gaining more and more independence from the Allied oversight that was put in place initially. There is a strong framework of rights and freedoms into the constitution as a legacy of these formation years. The main power that keeps that in place is the constitutional court with its long history of landmark decisions and a general tendency to overturn the steady trickle of new legislation that seeks to limit personal rights, mostly in the guise of better prosecution of crimes. For example, the right to control the use of one's own data is a result of ruling of that court. No lawmaker would have come up with that.

LockAndLol 6y ago

> Now you know how the Germans hate privacy, you will almost certainly be asking about alternative locations. I don't know where this guy comes from but this has to be the most sensationalist sentence in that blog post. It's on par with "non Americans hate freedom". If Germans hated privacy, why would they be the biggest bandwidth contributors to the TOR network? Not sure the author was using all of his brain when he wrote that blog post.

chickenpotpie 6y ago
Devils advocate: if you hate tor you should try to contribute to the network as much as possible. The more you control it, the more you can exploit it when vulnerabilities are found.
- luckylion 6y ago
  It's not the German government though, it's individuals and private pro-privacy organizations that provide the nodes. Among them are some that the blog post mentioned because they were targeted by law enforcement.
- Sebb767 6y ago
  That's the equivalent of saying if you want Microsoft to fail, buy all their products in the hope that they get too big and inefficient and therefore fail. Sure, more control helps, but you need quite a lot and it would be prohibitively expensive at the moment (and also noticeable).

luckylion 6y ago

> The high number of high-speed relays and exits in Germany mean that it is not too uncommon to get both a German guard and exit. This gives the state an easier time if they want to target someone using traffic correlation attacks. No, it doesn't. They'd need to control those computers, and they don't, do they? Because if they do, then "move your exit node somewhere else" won't help, because "you" are the state. And if they don't, no, I don't believe it's feasible for them to look at raw traffic (e.g. on the datacenter level) for two nodes in Germany and correlate individual data streams that may or may not be from one TOR connection. > That also does not take in account the planned German law that will allow authorities to redirect traffic to state-owned servers, to infect users with viruses/Trojans. They'd have to control the server though. They can't just decree that all TOR traffic must now be routed through their malicious endpoint. The laws are targeting ISPs and service providers and are for individual cases (i.e. "we know who's on the line") not for mass-infection, and will require a court order. They could do the individual surveillance with court order previously, what's new is that the provider can be forced to cooperate and proxy the traffic. It's still not applicable to TOR because it's not one large provider, and you can generally not say who's on the line.

kleton 6y ago

Off-topic, but what is the current state of tor onion (hidden) services? Are they easy to de-anonymize?

Cantbekhan 6y ago
There are certainly plenty of black markets thriving on onion services. Some have been online and serving for quite a few years. They seem fine. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23818727

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

I ran an exit node about a decade ago. There are no freedom-fighting journalists in repressed countries using TOR. There are only pornographers, BitTorrent users, crypto-haxxing "Z3r0cools" who use it to feel like they are doing something crypto-haxxy, and botnet command and controllers. Countries in which TOR will be useful treat TOR users as de-facto criminals or block it altogether. Using TOR in a totalitarian state (and it is easily detectable) is worse than speaking out against the state. Countries in which TOR is not needed are full of crypto-haxxing "Z3r0cools" who think they are actually helping someone by promoting TOR. When you mention that TOR was an experiment-- one that failed-- to shield spies from foreign governments that crypto-haxxing Z3r0cools co-opted you get scorn. When you point out that TOR fails in its primary purpose: non-attributable access to information or communications in totalitarian regimes you get scorn. There is no space for criticism of TOR which makes it not a product or technology but a religion-like ideology.

john-shaffer 6y ago
> When you point out that TOR fails in its primary purpose: non-attributable access to information or communications in totalitarian regimes you get scorn. It's my understanding that the subjects of totalitarian regimes use software such as Ultrasurf [1], and not TOR. I agree that TOR is not very useful in practice, but it seems misleading to state that without mentioning the success of the alternatives. [1] https://ultrasurf.us/ https://ultrasurf.us/

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bar00000n 6y ago

When you use tor you are just another coward and a thief. Or a kiddo ashamed that he is jerking off to porn. so relax no one cares what you say in politics until you overcome your limitations. this is the right label for tor users.

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