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Drastic increase in Tor clients from Germany
- ulrischa 3y agoGermany is blocking a lot of websites ( i.e. rt.com)
- dhoe 3y agoBut that's been happening for some time already, while this spike is recent.
- Xeophon 3y agoRussian-run sites like RT are banned through the whole EU. However, such spikes cannot be seen in other EU countries such as France.
- commandnotfound 3y agoI just opened rt.com on my home connection with no tor or VPN and everything worked. I'm physically in the Czech Republic if that matters.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI just read on Al-Jazeera that Putin is back in control, that's why :)
- jd_paton 3y agoSource? I’m in NL and I can access it just fine. I use Cloudflare for DNS though
- mkl95 3y agoI would say this is the best solution. I live in another EU country where ISPs also block it via DNS.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoNo excuse for that censorship honestly.
- flangola7 3y agoEliminating enemy propaganda is extremely common and a long running practice. It's less censorship and more self defense.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoLooking at it from that perspective it makes a kind of sense, although I think it is less defensible in modern day with the internet.
- flangola7 3y agoIt's more defensible! Propaganda is far, far, less effective as a blind radio broadcast or air pamphlets than micro-targeted interactive sessions intricately engineered to maximize neurological reinforcement loops. Absolutely insidious.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoNo, it's far less defensible, because people have the internet to look up and verify things as needed. This kind of censorship is just nannying, which I'm generally against. Then again, given how inept people are at thinking for themselves, maybe a nanny state is what's best.
- flangola7 3y ago> No, it's far less defensible, because people have the internet to look up and verify things as needed. Actual it is far more defensible, as I already clarified earlier. Propaganda remains effective regardless if there is the ability to verify it or not - and that is assuming everything can and will be checked by every person, which isn't realistic. > This kind of censorship is just nannying, which I'm generally against. It's not nannying at all. It's basic national self defense. Pen is mightier than the sword and all that. Brainworms are an insidious contagion.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoMight also depend on how it’s enforced. The blocks in Austria basically do not exist because they are only done by carrier DNS servers. Use 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 and you would not know.
- lxgr 3y agoThe vast majority of people use their ISP’s DNS server, though.
- the_mitsuhiko 3y agoI don’t think that is relevant here. If in one country you need a VPN to bypass blocking but others you only need a different DNS server I would expect most users to go for the latter if given a choice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mr_mitm 3y agoI can open rt.com just fine in Germany. (Not using my ISP's DNS server though. It's true that rt.com won't resolve when using it.)
- beebeepka 3y agoLies. I just tried rt.com on my home connection and it opened without a problem
- cynicalsecurity 3y ago[flagged]
- 0xDEF 3y agoNot really. I preferred the approach of pre-Musk twitter that clearly labeled it as Russian state media. Also banning it had little effect. The war propaganda coming out of Russia was hilariously incompetent. The real insidious anti-Ukrainian propaganda is coming from pro-Russian Westerners, pre-dominantly the American populist right.
- hutzlibu 3y agoAnd NATO or ukrainian propaganda? Because that is also a thing, even though not as blatant. The problem with banning information, is that it is easy to abuse this and it creates a martyr effect. I rather would like people be able to judge information by themself and not decide for them.
- duozerk 3y ago[flagged]
- 0xDEF 3y ago[flagged]
- duozerk 3y agoLooking into it you appear to be right, thanks; that single study is almost exclusively the single source of all similar articles, too. Admittedly I don't use twitter, so I don't have first hand experience in this. It's still pretty obvious that there is a propaganda effort from NATO as well, and one that seems to work a lot more than Russia's on western audiences. > There are literally viral tweets blaming Ukraine for creating COVID-19. lmao that's so insane it almost sounds like a bit
- 3y ago
- aqme28 3y agoIs tor really the go-to workaround for this and not just a VPN?
- reaperman 3y agoVPN seems like it would be vastly preferable for performance and reliability.
- Zetobal 3y ago- it's dns blocked -
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sparkling 3y agoUhm... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrungen_von_Internetinhalten_in_Deutschland https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperrungen_von_Internetinhalte... Edit: parent poster has now changed his post after claiming there was no blocking in Germany
- RobotToaster 3y agoChina has the great firewall, the UK has Hadrian's firewall, I guess this is the Berlin firewall.
- circuit10 3y agoAs someone from the UK I’ve never seen anything blocked on my home Internet (except actual scam sites but you can turn that off, and yes that’s from my ISP and not the browser) My mobile data does incorrectly flag some things as 18+ though
- RobotToaster 3y agoPlenty of high seas sites are blocked.
- wonderwonder 3y agoAre you required to provide doxxing personal information proving your age on these sites or can you browse anonymously?
- circuit10 3y agoOnly on my mobile data. They’re not actually 18+ sites though, for example someone’s blog that was posted here is blocked and it seems the Tor site is too But I think that’s a Vodaphone thing rather than a UK thing
- wonderwonder 3y agoSo private companies are able to decide the websites their customers are allowed to access?
- xp84 3y agoPretty sure that’s true in the US too, though not common I don’t know of regulation otherwise. Please correct me if I’m wrong, anyone
- fefe23 3y agoCould these be attempts at data mining for unmasking Tor users?
- wood_spirit 3y agoBack in 2017 the German BND was revealed to have a history with that: https://netzpolitik.org/2017/secret-documents-reveal-german-foreign-spy-agency-bnd-attacks-the-anonymity-network-tor-and-advises-not-to-use-it/ https://netzpolitik.org/2017/secret-documents-reveal-german-...
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoI would be shocked if any intelligence service in the world wouldn't have their hands in that, even in the most respected democracies. Infiltrating "underground" networks and communities, and breaking encryption, is literally their job. Especially now that there's a war on our borders, the spooks have a plethora of reasons to use to justify their invasiveness. We just need to make sure to keep them accountable, which is the tricky part, as their work is always classified and our human and privacy rights often clash with their jobs, so unless any whistleblower comes through we might never know the extent of their rule breaking.
- Grimburger 3y agoSeems most likely, either by academics or government. Not really the most subtle way about it though and likely to face some response. I'd assume both have the capability to run a fairly accurate simulated network without anyone noticing so it's a bit strange.
- Blahah 3y agoI doubt it's either of those - it would be extremely unethical and illegal for academics to do, and governments don't need to take this approach because they have a bunch of systemic attacks that are less obvious. Perhaps someone with a botnet looking to sell unmasking, which has been popping up as a service recently. Or trying to use it against a specific DWM or vendor.
- curiousfab 3y agoFrom an average of significantly below 500k to almost 2.5M users. This drives up the global number of connecting users from approx. 3M to almost 5M. Hard to imagine that so many people in Germany suddenly switched to TOR, especially since there has not been any significant event lately that may have triggered such a decision (afaik)? My personal experience with TOR (as an administrator of various websites and services) is that it is a major source of unwanted/malicious traffic (spam, etc.) and most of it is automated. The big increase is probably not users but bots?
- mistrial9 3y agodo you believe these numbers?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- j16sdiz 3y agoIt would be much helpful if you could provide one or two reasons why the number could be wrong.... or maybe make some comments on the methodology, etc.. Just question about the accuracy without any context or reasons are not contributing to the argument.
- netsharc 3y agoMaybe related to the Proto-Nazi party AfD winning a district a few days ago. And this 5 day old news story: https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-far-right-afd-security-surveillance/ https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-far-right-afd-securi... "Germany’s far-right AfD placed under security service surveillance" - "The party is now treated as a ‘suspected case’ for far-right extremism". I wonder if anyone can see inside the right-wing chat networks and if they've been mentioning Tor. Although in the raw CSV's the spike started around mid-June...
- 0xDEF 3y agoAs a Danish person who has been to Eastern Germany (outside Berlin) I'm really not surprised by the rise of the AfD. It's common to see people on social media praise Germans for de-Nazification and criticize the Japanese for not confronting their past in the same way. Those people have clearly not interacted with Eastern Germans. In Eastern Germany the underlying neuroticism, persecution complex, and willingness to believe in every conspiracy theory, things that were foundational for the rise of Nazism, is very much still alive.
- hgadx 3y agoThis is completely removed from reality. The right wing movements in Europe started around 2000 in Italy, Austria, the Netherlands and France. Germany was way behind. In Germany the AfD won voters after Merkel let in too many refugees in 2015 against the will of many CDU voters. The AfD is probably less extreme than MAGA and most European counterparts, including Scandinavian ones. But it is always easy to pile on Germany, isn't it? (I don't vote for them, don't like them, but this is getting silly.)
- gmerc 3y agoPlease you are whitewashing history. Hoyerswerda gruesst. This shit was happening already in the 90s right after reunification and in the context of OP - it’s not surprising at all, eastern germany had a very different take on denazificaiton.
- Jibbedeyeah 3y ago[flagged]
- Moldoteck 3y ago[flagged]
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago[flagged]
- isoos 3y agoI use tor for exploring topics that I don't want to tie to my regular profile (ranging from professional software development, through health care issues, but also hobbies, fiction and nsfw content). Having these browsing in a separate profile and also IP address makes it much more relaxed to look for interesting stuff on the internet. (I am not really fond of advertisement that tries to sell me whatever I've visited in the past month, on unrelated pages.) It saddens me that the default response is ban, increasingly so for services that need account, but even just reading a webpage can become tedious or impossible :( Please, do not ruin this option, because even though you may not use it today, you may need it in the future. Note: I also use tor for low volume crawling. When high volume is needed, it is more favorable to subscribe for domestic VPN proxies, so you may be blocking tor, but you won't block those ranges, and the robots will get their content anyway.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y ago> Please, do not ruin this option I don't believe that I'm the one that ruined this option for you. Small web hosts simply don't have the capacity, budget, or patience to deal with the 95% garbage originating from these IP addresses. Tragedy of the commons, I guess.
- ilyt 3y agoThere is no reason to allow Tor IPs on most sites sadly. The abuse it is used for far exceeds legitimate traffic
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoWell, I’ve always tried to make my service available through Tor, but now that I faced an attack of 20,000 RPS distributed over all the exit nodes of the Tor network making requests to a computationally expensive (and non-cacheable) endpoint, and came out with 6x the hosting bill I usually get, I decided to block the entire network. Maybe there’s an alternative reality where people do the right thing, and in that world I wouldn’t have to block Tor, but I don’t live in that world.
- golergka 3y agoHave something changed in how German police goes after drug dealers? It's the most important use case for Tor anyway.
- carstenhag 3y agoNo new law or something was passed, so if at all, it's a technique/method that won't be published.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- iguana_lawyer 3y agoLooking at the chart it seems to line up with the war in Ukraine. Germany was a target of Prigozhin’s Internet Research Agency (troll farms). I wonder if we will see a drop in Tor usage now that his coup has failed and his organization is being dissolved.
- V__ 3y agoThere is no way these are organic users. Could it be, that some VPN is using Germany as an entrypoint?
- sparkling 3y agoWhy? VPN users mostly care about the Exit IP country, not the Entry IP country.
- hedora 3y agoSome VPNs have a “then connect to tor” option for extra anonymity against malicious tor entrypoints and against your local ISP seeing that you are browsing tor [hosted sites].
- FinnKuhn 3y agoCould be that someone is using a Cloud Provider in Germany, for example Hetzner
- sparkling 3y agoDoubt it. Hetzners smallest machine is something like $4/month, additional IPv4 addresses come with extra cost. They have quite tight service quotas, and this 2M additional IPs would be almost their entire IPv4 pool.
- moooo99 3y agoI don’t know about the details, but I know Hetzner has quite a backstory with their servers being abused by spammers. I don’t know how the state is today, but maybe it’s not as unlikely as it seems?
- withinboredom 3y agoIf they even think you are spamming, you get banned. Pretty much closed to individuals (according to Reddit, if they don’t even like the way your ID looks, you’re banned) while businesses get more leeway to do things.
- tyiz 3y ago[flagged]
- ruune 3y agoSounds interesting, do you have a link or something for me?
- jandrese 3y ago[flagged]
- spuz 3y agoThat site doesn't seem to have any stories about Germany
- moooo99 3y agoHonestly, the most notable political prosecution I could think of right now is police in Bavaria prosecuting climate activists under anti terror laws in anticipation of a possible crime.
- nebalee 3y agoThe most notable recent _political_ prosecution would be the Lina E. trial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Lina_E https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Lina_E.
- elikoga 3y ago[flagged]
- swader999 3y ago[flagged]
- wonderwonder 3y ago[flagged]
- Zeratoss 3y agoPlease don't believe any old propaganda you here about Germany. You can browse "anti-immigrarion" Websites as much as you want
- wood_spirit 3y agoClicking around and looking at the chart for random other countries shows a spike for Sweden too, whereas Finland has a different but interesting pattern all of its own.
- chronicsonic 3y agoWonder if the fact that they’re related to NATO, who is at war, have anything to do with it.
- HumanOstrich 3y agoCan you elaborate on this a bit?
- lost_tourist 3y agoI can think of a country currently at war that has a much more aggressive and longer history of being a bad actor on the internet than NATO countries...
- hnarn 3y agoNato is not at war.
- fit2rule 3y ago[dead]
- t0bia_s 3y agoDon't know how Finland's government deal with Ukraine/Russian agenda, but here in Czechia, government acts like totalitarian authority. Blames Putin for every economical problems (there is official guide how to propagate problems with food shortage [1]), they block on DNS level (cz.nic) some websites that, according to government, spread Russian propaganda [2] and also announced that supporting Russian invasion is crime by law and Russia is terrorist state. No wonder, that Tor users in Czechia rised over 60% since 2020, when government use totalitarian practices like state that they trying to fight against. Also overall trust in government is historical low here. 74% citizens disapprove what government does here. [3] Which does not mean that we approve invasion on Ukraine at all. We host far more Ukrainian refugees as we should - over 500 000 which is 5% of Czechia population [4]. [1] https://www.mvcr.cz/soubor/krit-memo-putin-hlad-komunikacni-doporuceni-pdf.aspx https://www.mvcr.cz/soubor/krit-memo-putin-hlad-komunikacni-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_in_Europe#Czech_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_survei... [3] https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/global-leader-approval https://pro.morningconsult.com/trackers/global-leader-approv... [4] https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine
- concordDance 3y agoDoes anyone understand the mass flagging and downvotes going on in this comment section? I'm very confused as I've never seen anything like it.
- maze-le 3y agoJust the usual political flamewar that happens here from time to time, not sure why it escalates on some threads and not on others though.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Andrex 3y agoProbably the posters involved. Blessing and a (minor) curse that HN doesn't use avatars. Harder to avoid commenters you know you don't like.
- chippy 3y agoI'm guessing that there is some automatic system that works on certain words in comments. Flame detection has been mentioned before. Probably in combination with account age or karma. I also imagine that users vouching for these might offset the behaviour.
- MrStonedOne 3y agoIf the number of comments in a post or subthread exceeds the upvotes, this leads to the flame detector activating. But also some accounts are just banned. Banned accounts can still comment, but they start dead and have to be vouched first before showing to anybody who didn't enable showdead in their profile.
- 93po 3y agoI have noticed a trend that some of my friends accounts get rate limited extremely easily while others don't. Not sure what's happening there, I assume there's a flag set by a mod or its otherwise calculated by karma total number of times the account has been flagged. it doesn't seem to correlate with recent controversial posting
- brucethemoose2 3y agoIs someone trying to compromise the Tor network? I read that Tor needs a certain percentage of non-malicious nodes to function, though I am not sure if that is applicable clients.
- TheNorthman 3y agoIt's not applicable to clients. A clients traffic never touches another client, only the nodes. Of course, malicious clients can ruin it for everyone else in the form of DoS attacks but that's clearly not happening here.
- chezelenkoooo 3y agoI think you're thinking of blockchain
- thissitesucks__ 3y ago[dead]
- kadoban 3y agoSybil attacks are more general than just in cryptocurrencies. They actually apply to Tor as well, just not to _this_ part of Tor.
- r4indeer 3y agoNo, the problem also applies to Tor. If a malicious actor controls large parts of the network, there is a high probability that the attacker controls your entire circuit or at least your entry and exit node. In the latter case, you can do timing attacks to determine which traffic on the exit node belongs to whom on the entry node.
- superkuh 3y agoTor metrics don't really tell you much about the actual human users of the networks. They mostly tell you about current bot/etc usage. It's why inferred tor v3 datarates have been wildly inflated (10gbps) ever since support was turned on in the release binaries despite 99% of human people using tor v2 (at the time).
- Vecr 3y agoYou've been posting about Onion v3 and "human people" for years at this point, nothing is going to happen. v2 onion addresses are not secure, plain HTTP is not secure unless you run it over Wireguard or IPSec with path filtering and use DNSSEC, and almost no one ever does that.
- joeythedolphin 3y agoIt could be INTERPOL
- troft 3y ago[flagged]
- FinnKuhn 3y agoInterestingly a similarly drastic increase in German Tor clients also happend back in 2017: https://www.chip.de/news/Raetselhafter-Nutzeranstieg-Zahl-deutscher-Tor-Nutzer-ploetzlich-explodiert_128117537.html https://www.chip.de/news/Raetselhafter-Nutzeranstieg-Zahl-de... if you configure the graph to show more years you can see the similarities: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?start=2012-01-01&end=2023-07-02&country=de&events=off https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html?...
- hedora 3y agoMost of the comments suggest strange conspiracy theories, but the traffic is an exponential ramp (drive into 2023). Also, there has been rapid growth in some neighboring countries. It could be organic growth. There have apparently been a few wiretapping scandals this year; people may be using it to access Ukraine/Russia, and a bunch of laws passed last year that incentivize US companies to block EU traffic (to avoid fines for data leaks). Any of those seem more plausible than a single actor renting a rack or dc in one country, and using tor to try to evade detection.
- jacooper 3y agoI've noticed VPN severs in Germany to be busier than usual too.
- sdsd 3y agoThe obvious explanation is that German ISP's blocked 711chan, so the onion service is the only way for them to access the site. Jk, but if you change 711chan to Krautchan maybe it's true
- Havoc 3y agoSudden 2 mill extra isn’t organic Chan users
- Havoc 3y agoPlausible options seem to be malware, another attempt to crack tor by enforcement or some sort of app that added tor browsing
- 19h 3y ago„These estimates are derived from the number of directory requests counted on directory authorities and mirrors.“ Depending on how these numbers are obtained, there is a non-zero chance at least part of this increase is caused by us.. note that this number is not indicative of the amount of users or origins (i.e. physical source addresses), but only count directory requests.
- tarcon 3y agoFrom around September 2022 to March 2023 media in Germany promoted the Snowflake Browser Extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/torproject-snowflake https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/torproject-snowf...) to help Iranians circumvent censorship. Is this a possible explanation?
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI'm not sure who titled this post, but the word "drastic" isn't found in the target web page. And as a native English speaker, "drastic" feels wrong for this usage. I would say it's an inadvertent swap of meaning with the term "dramatic" which would make more sense. "Drastic" has a negative connotation of intent behind it. For example, "drastic increase in police enforcement of laws in Germany" would make sense. In the case of the headline, it just rubs me the wrong way.
- usr1106 3y agoProbably submitted by a Genglish speaker? The German word is drastisch. Dramatisch also exists, but as a native speaker I would say drastisch is the better choice here. Dramatisch would suggest that there a serious consequences like e.g. bringing Tor to its knees. What English word would fit best I leave native speakers to comment.
- DoItToMe81 3y agoI have to wonder how many of these are from cheap German servers, from criminals trying to DDoS rival markets.
- nupilios 3y agoAny updates in regards to this data?