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And in the end it can't circumvent stuff like the great firewall of China. In the end Toe is just a legacy project from the CIA/NSA that has outlived it's usef

by aredox 3y ago

And in the end it can't circumvent stuff like the great firewall of China. In the end Toe is just a legacy project from the CIA/NSA that has outlived it's usefulness. The NSA has certainly redteamed all the ways to take it down or uncloak users, if needs be, so it's not even a tool against a potential fall into dictatorship of the USA.

holmesworcester 3y ago
> And in the end it can't circumvent stuff like the great firewall of China. Actually, this isn't true: Tor with private Snowflake bridges can be very effective against the Great Firewall. I'm an activist who works in this area and I've spoken with activists who were using it as recently as this year. The issue is scaling bridge discovery, since any automated bridge discovery mechanism rapidly exposes available bridges to a determined censor. But any team doing high profile, notable, or sensitive work can find an individual or organization outside China to provide them with private bridges. So Tor is one effective option now for key activists in China, just not a mass-scale solution for everyone.
- solanav 3y ago
  is it better than something like shadowsocks?
  - cosentiyes 3y ago
    for anonymity, yes (if using a "private" snowflake). for daily use or basic firewall circumvention, not really. as others have mentioned, it is more convenient and faster to just use shadowsocks to a digital ocean droplet or other vm.
- DANmode 3y ago
  Thank you.
ravenstine 3y ago
Tor is a meme in 2023. Even advocates for it seem to believe it's only really good for circumvention, which is the totally wrong way to look at it. Having a built-in outproxy to the web is probably it's greatest flaw, not its strength. Why? Because there's nothing stopping anyone from setting up exit nodes and analyzing the traffic. The open web itself is a vulnerability. Being an anonymizer for the web also encourages people to not contribute energy to "hidden services" but to the non-hidden web, which is self defeating. And as others have pointed out, Tor wouldn't scale if everyone was using it. Contrast this with I2P which not only would scale but become more resistant to DDOS attacks with the more nodes on the network. Unlike For, I2P has no distinction between nodes, mostly because it's not designed to be an outproxy. But no, let's keep insisting that everyone use a deep state tool with chronic flaws because reasons. /s
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  > And as others have pointed out, Tor wouldn't scale if everyone was using it. Contrast this with I2P which not only would scale but become more resistant to DDOS attacks with the more nodes on the network. One objection a lot of people in this thread have to using Tor is the (misconception) that they'll be relaying Tor traffic. (It doesn't work this way in Tor.) But what you're saying is that i2p will scale because this is the default behavior in i2p. But is that what people want? Also, hidden services have been harder for Tor to scale than exit nodes, at least in the past few years. I don't think this is the result of the fact that Tor provides exit nodes. I think it's just a result of the onion service connection process being a series of fragile steps. I do agree that supporting traffic to the web results in the Tor dev team prioritizing this use case over traffic to hidden services, but that's understandable given that it's the vast majority of their traffic and usage.
  - nvy 3y ago
    >One objection a lot of people in this thread have to using Tor is the (misconception) that they'll be relaying Tor traffic. Um. I'm pretty sure that nodes relaying Tor traffic is the fundamental principle underlying Tor. Everyone relays Tor traffic when using it.
pandog 3y ago
There are a bunch of projects from Tor to aid in circumvention of the great firewall of China: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-ch...

by aredox 3y ago

holmesworcester 3y ago

> And in the end it can't circumvent stuff like the great firewall of China. Actually, this isn't true: Tor with private Snowflake bridges can be very effective against the Great Firewall. I'm an activist who works in this area and I've spoken with activists who were using it as recently as this year. The issue is scaling bridge discovery, since any automated bridge discovery mechanism rapidly exposes available bridges to a determined censor. But any team doing high profile, notable, or sensitive work can find an individual or organization outside China to provide them with private bridges. So Tor is one effective option now for key activists in China, just not a mass-scale solution for everyone.

solanav 3y ago
is it better than something like shadowsocks?
- cosentiyes 3y ago
  for anonymity, yes (if using a "private" snowflake). for daily use or basic firewall circumvention, not really. as others have mentioned, it is more convenient and faster to just use shadowsocks to a digital ocean droplet or other vm.
DANmode 3y ago
Thank you.

ravenstine 3y ago

Tor is a meme in 2023. Even advocates for it seem to believe it's only really good for circumvention, which is the totally wrong way to look at it. Having a built-in outproxy to the web is probably it's greatest flaw, not its strength. Why? Because there's nothing stopping anyone from setting up exit nodes and analyzing the traffic. The open web itself is a vulnerability. Being an anonymizer for the web also encourages people to not contribute energy to "hidden services" but to the non-hidden web, which is self defeating. And as others have pointed out, Tor wouldn't scale if everyone was using it. Contrast this with I2P which not only would scale but become more resistant to DDOS attacks with the more nodes on the network. Unlike For, I2P has no distinction between nodes, mostly because it's not designed to be an outproxy. But no, let's keep insisting that everyone use a deep state tool with chronic flaws because reasons. /s

holmesworcester 3y ago
> And as others have pointed out, Tor wouldn't scale if everyone was using it. Contrast this with I2P which not only would scale but become more resistant to DDOS attacks with the more nodes on the network. One objection a lot of people in this thread have to using Tor is the (misconception) that they'll be relaying Tor traffic. (It doesn't work this way in Tor.) But what you're saying is that i2p will scale because this is the default behavior in i2p. But is that what people want? Also, hidden services have been harder for Tor to scale than exit nodes, at least in the past few years. I don't think this is the result of the fact that Tor provides exit nodes. I think it's just a result of the onion service connection process being a series of fragile steps. I do agree that supporting traffic to the web results in the Tor dev team prioritizing this use case over traffic to hidden services, but that's understandable given that it's the vast majority of their traffic and usage.
- nvy 3y ago
  >One objection a lot of people in this thread have to using Tor is the (misconception) that they'll be relaying Tor traffic. Um. I'm pretty sure that nodes relaying Tor traffic is the fundamental principle underlying Tor. Everyone relays Tor traffic when using it.

pandog 3y ago

There are a bunch of projects from Tor to aid in circumvention of the great firewall of China: https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-china/ https://support.torproject.org/censorship/connecting-from-ch...