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EDIT: this comment's mostly moot as an argument but I'm keeping it around for discussion. The founder of Quiet replied here[0]. This being on Tor gives me mixe

EDIT: this comment's mostly moot as an argument but I'm keeping it around for discussion. The founder of Quiet replied here[0]. This being on Tor gives me mixed feelings. Tor's a volunteer run, fairly resource-heavy privacy tool designed to protect the most vulnerable internet users out there -- people facing state censorship on the level of corporal punishment being used, for example. While the Tor network has more capacity these days than it used to, and while having a good toolchain for Tor's intended user base matters, that's rarely the intended user base of apps like this. When something like Quiet comes along, even with its targeting of users in open societies, it would benefit both technically and ethically from using non-Tor networks: HTTPS is safer than ever, and if you use ECH, DNS-over-HTTPS, and have reasonable cipher requirements for TLS, you can achieve an excellent level of privacy. For when open society groups need to talk to people at risk of harm, having a Tor bridge or other such mode would be a good way to approach that. It also makes implementing video and audio much easier technically, and it decouples the "casual user" code base from the "sensitive user" code base; while that means you might have less shared code, it also means you can focus on security through simplicity (by way of fewer or less-complex features) for the sensitive users. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37480552

anon____ 3y ago
On the other hand, if projects like this, as a side effect, increase the number of relays, and normalize using Tor, it's a win for everyone. Quiet should pay for a few servers to be used as relays and exit nodes, and also encourage users to do so, or to donate to that.
- chx 3y ago
  > normalize using Tor, Yeah that will not happen. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906900
  - anon____ 3y ago
    What do you mean by that?
    - madamelic 3y ago
      You don't get to choose what flows through your exit node. It could be a Chinese dissident, it could be someone accessing a child porn forum. When authorities go to track down the IP that sent requests to another, your IP will be the one listed on that request with no ability to trace back what IP actually sent the request so it will be difficult to not pin you for whatever was accessed.
      - anon____ 3y ago
        This is true and already reality, no need for hypotheticals. There are exit nodes serving child porn right now, yet, the operators are not prosecuted. The child porn traffickers and other problematic users are all on Tor already. With the growing number of users their proportion will only decline.
        chx 3y ago
        > With the growing number of users their proportion will only decline. [citation needed]
        anon____ 3y ago
        My only assumption that would need citation (that I cannot give, I admit) is that currently the proportion of shady users is much higher on Tor than on the general Internet. From here, it's pure and simple logic: as more users transition to Tor (asymptotically all of them), this proportion can only decrease.
        chx 3y ago
        1. there's no clear indication whether the Tor userbase grows. Indeed, I would suspect the constant mobile is a hindrance 2. There's no clear indication in which direction the online CP people grow. They can be more or less over time. I am unaware of any studies because it's obviously extremely hard to measure.
  - hiatus 3y ago
    How do exit nodes factor in? This seems to operate like hidden services thus no exit nodes needed.
    - holmesworcester 3y ago
      (Quiet dev here.) Correct. Quiet traffic does not use Tor exit nodes, though we might use them someday, e.g. for fetching preview metadata when you post a link.
    - chx 3y ago
      This was a comment about the general normalization of Tor.
      - hiatus 3y ago
        A broadly used application that requires tor for everyday use would be beneficial for the general normalization of tor. How would many people using quiet be anything but a step in the direction of general normalization of tor?
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  (Quiet founder here) We already support Tor financially and will probably also run relays someday! Quiet is a founding member of Tor's Onion Services Resource Coalition, which started in response to last year's DDoS against the Tor network, which affected onion service connection times. Alongside a small circle of other affected products we helped Tor raise enough to hire ~2 full-time engineers to work on onion service reliability, which had been a bit underfunded because onion services only represent a small share of Tor's existing usage. See: https://blog.torproject.org/tor-network-ddos-attack/ https://blog.torproject.org/tor-network-ddos-attack/
  - anon____ 3y ago
    Thanks for addressing this, this is great to hear!
thinkmassive 3y ago
> it would benefit both technically and ethically from using non-Tor networks Obviously the performance of tor is reduced when traffic increases, but performance isn’t the goal, privacy is. Increasing the traffic of "normal" use cases (as opposed to those targeted by state-level opposition) improves privacy for the entire network. I agree that using tor for all your video conferencing and streaming needs is probably irresponsible, possibly unethical, but the performance is likely to be so poor that it’s not a good use case anyway. Using tor for everyday text chat (by real humans) is unlikely to have a negative performance impact, and it does provide more noise for attackers to sift through, so it could arguably improve privacy for those who need it most.
- mlinsey 3y ago
  if Quiet doesn't catch on to provide that noise, would it be beneficial to flood Tor with LLM-generated conversatinos? We're really good at "cheaply generate near-infinite quantities of human-looking text" these days...
  - mulmen 3y ago
    Presumably the content of the message is irrelevant to Tor. If the humanness of the content matters then the game is over anyway because that means it’s being read by a third party. What matters for Tor is plausible looking traffic and uninteresting people doing uninteresting things with it. Then you can’t use traffic analysis to identify Tor users as points of interest. If everyone on Tor is evading an oppressive government then oppressive governments can just use Tor to identify the people evading them.
- verandaguy 3y ago
  >performance isn’t the goal, privacy is I agree, but if performance gets bad enough, people will look elsewhere and to possibly less-private solutions. It's parallel to the whole idea of a tradeoff between convenience and security that I've had to deal with for a big part of my career (and personal anecdotes aside, why adoption for tools like PGP never picked up, at least in part). Anyway, my original comment's mostly moot as an argument (though I'll keep it around for discussion's sake) -- the founder replied and it sounds like they're working with Tor to make sure the network stays healthy, which is all I really care about.
holmesworcester 3y ago
(Quiet founder here) I've been a bit breathlessly replying to comments and am now late for a weekly team meeting, but I just wanted to say that we're friends with the Tor Project, they like us and support apps like Quiet (and Briar, Cwtch, etc.) existing, and we're also part of a small circle of Tor fans who funded Tor to hire two full-time engineers to focus on onion services reliability after the DDoS attack last year, so we're donors to the project too. Also, it's likely that distant future versions of Quiet (where we reach a large audience) will use Tor as just one way to connect. Gotta go but will respond more thoughtfully soon!
- verandaguy 3y ago
  I appreciate you taking the time to reply, and thanks for being involved with Tor on this! If they're fine with it, I trust you're good in terms of resource usage.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    We are very aware that Tor has created a public good, very grateful for it, and we will not abuse it. In a world where Quiet is a significant portion of Tor's ~2-3 million users (good problem to have!) we'll be in a good place to add other transports. Someday Quiet could even encourage users to run Snowflake bridges! (Though we have a lot of work to do before that would be meaningful at all!) Also, thanks for saying that and for updating the comment in response to more information! People aren't always so gracious in online forums and I'm sincerely grateful.
- bauruine 3y ago
  Adding to this as a relay operator, while I can't speak for the Tor Project or other operators, I think this is a perfectly valid use case for Tor and I happily provide ressources for it.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    Aw thanks!
orbital-decay 3y ago
Increased adoption also drives the volunteer amount increase. Every non-shady use of Tor is welcome, as it improves the network reputation, anonymity, and protects the use case it was created for. The more immediate issue for Tor is the vulnerability to fingerprinting if the use of Tor Browser falls below the comfortable levels.
KennyBlanken 3y ago
> HTTPS is safer than ever, and if you use ECH, DNS-over-HTTPS, and have reasonable cipher requirements for TLS, you can achieve an excellent level of privacy. Is ESNI or ECH actually in significant use?
- verandaguy 3y ago
  Given that it's still fairly new (just coming out of draft in the coming months), no, it's not, but it is _in_ use, and it can be deployed by server operators and client devs in its draft state. With low adoption comes the risk of flagging by bad actors on the network, but hopefully that goes away quickly after ECH comes out of draft. The silver lining of having so much of the internet controlled by massive, monolithic actors like Cloudflare and Google is that when they flip the switch on ECH, it'll be widely in use within weeks or days, not months or years; and while I don't keep up with Google's involvement, it does seem like Cloudflare's been active on the ECH front with the IETF.
rakoo 3y ago
> [Tor is] designed to protect the most vulnerable internet users out there -- people facing state censorship on the level of corporal punishment being used, for example While this is the reason Tor was created, I don't believe it's good to segregate usage based on whether we actually need that level of privacy or not. If anything, using tor when no one else uses it may decrease privacy, because you're more easily targetable. If everyone uses it all the time, it's not clear anymore whether you're using it because you actively try to protect yourself or it's just there. Just like SSL was created at a time when businesses started to get interested in the web, now TLS is used for everything and can't be used to target specific uses. Tor is like vaccines and masks: it works better if everyone uses them
- wizzwizz4 3y ago
  If you are running an exit node, yes. However, if the general public takes up this advice, connections will time out before the whistleblower has finished uploading the 15GiB .zip to the dead drop.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

anon____ 3y ago

On the other hand, if projects like this, as a side effect, increase the number of relays, and normalize using Tor, it's a win for everyone. Quiet should pay for a few servers to be used as relays and exit nodes, and also encourage users to do so, or to donate to that.

chx 3y ago
> normalize using Tor, Yeah that will not happen. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906900 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36906900
- anon____ 3y ago
  What do you mean by that?
  - madamelic 3y ago
    You don't get to choose what flows through your exit node. It could be a Chinese dissident, it could be someone accessing a child porn forum. When authorities go to track down the IP that sent requests to another, your IP will be the one listed on that request with no ability to trace back what IP actually sent the request so it will be difficult to not pin you for whatever was accessed.
    - anon____ 3y ago
      This is true and already reality, no need for hypotheticals. There are exit nodes serving child porn right now, yet, the operators are not prosecuted. The child porn traffickers and other problematic users are all on Tor already. With the growing number of users their proportion will only decline.
      - chx 3y ago
        > With the growing number of users their proportion will only decline. [citation needed]
        anon____ 3y ago
        My only assumption that would need citation (that I cannot give, I admit) is that currently the proportion of shady users is much higher on Tor than on the general Internet. From here, it's pure and simple logic: as more users transition to Tor (asymptotically all of them), this proportion can only decrease.
        chx 3y ago
        1. there's no clear indication whether the Tor userbase grows. Indeed, I would suspect the constant mobile is a hindrance 2. There's no clear indication in which direction the online CP people grow. They can be more or less over time. I am unaware of any studies because it's obviously extremely hard to measure.
- hiatus 3y ago
  How do exit nodes factor in? This seems to operate like hidden services thus no exit nodes needed.
  - holmesworcester 3y ago
    (Quiet dev here.) Correct. Quiet traffic does not use Tor exit nodes, though we might use them someday, e.g. for fetching preview metadata when you post a link.
  - chx 3y ago
    This was a comment about the general normalization of Tor.
    - hiatus 3y ago
      A broadly used application that requires tor for everyday use would be beneficial for the general normalization of tor. How would many people using quiet be anything but a step in the direction of general normalization of tor?
holmesworcester 3y ago
(Quiet founder here) We already support Tor financially and will probably also run relays someday! Quiet is a founding member of Tor's Onion Services Resource Coalition, which started in response to last year's DDoS against the Tor network, which affected onion service connection times. Alongside a small circle of other affected products we helped Tor raise enough to hire ~2 full-time engineers to work on onion service reliability, which had been a bit underfunded because onion services only represent a small share of Tor's existing usage. See: https://blog.torproject.org/tor-network-ddos-attack/ https://blog.torproject.org/tor-network-ddos-attack/
- anon____ 3y ago
  Thanks for addressing this, this is great to hear!

thinkmassive 3y ago

> it would benefit both technically and ethically from using non-Tor networks Obviously the performance of tor is reduced when traffic increases, but performance isn’t the goal, privacy is. Increasing the traffic of "normal" use cases (as opposed to those targeted by state-level opposition) improves privacy for the entire network. I agree that using tor for all your video conferencing and streaming needs is probably irresponsible, possibly unethical, but the performance is likely to be so poor that it’s not a good use case anyway. Using tor for everyday text chat (by real humans) is unlikely to have a negative performance impact, and it does provide more noise for attackers to sift through, so it could arguably improve privacy for those who need it most.

mlinsey 3y ago
if Quiet doesn't catch on to provide that noise, would it be beneficial to flood Tor with LLM-generated conversatinos? We're really good at "cheaply generate near-infinite quantities of human-looking text" these days...
- mulmen 3y ago
  Presumably the content of the message is irrelevant to Tor. If the humanness of the content matters then the game is over anyway because that means it’s being read by a third party. What matters for Tor is plausible looking traffic and uninteresting people doing uninteresting things with it. Then you can’t use traffic analysis to identify Tor users as points of interest. If everyone on Tor is evading an oppressive government then oppressive governments can just use Tor to identify the people evading them.
verandaguy 3y ago
>performance isn’t the goal, privacy is I agree, but if performance gets bad enough, people will look elsewhere and to possibly less-private solutions. It's parallel to the whole idea of a tradeoff between convenience and security that I've had to deal with for a big part of my career (and personal anecdotes aside, why adoption for tools like PGP never picked up, at least in part). Anyway, my original comment's mostly moot as an argument (though I'll keep it around for discussion's sake) -- the founder replied and it sounds like they're working with Tor to make sure the network stays healthy, which is all I really care about.

holmesworcester 3y ago

(Quiet founder here) I've been a bit breathlessly replying to comments and am now late for a weekly team meeting, but I just wanted to say that we're friends with the Tor Project, they like us and support apps like Quiet (and Briar, Cwtch, etc.) existing, and we're also part of a small circle of Tor fans who funded Tor to hire two full-time engineers to focus on onion services reliability after the DDoS attack last year, so we're donors to the project too. Also, it's likely that distant future versions of Quiet (where we reach a large audience) will use Tor as just one way to connect. Gotta go but will respond more thoughtfully soon!

verandaguy 3y ago
I appreciate you taking the time to reply, and thanks for being involved with Tor on this! If they're fine with it, I trust you're good in terms of resource usage.
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  We are very aware that Tor has created a public good, very grateful for it, and we will not abuse it. In a world where Quiet is a significant portion of Tor's ~2-3 million users (good problem to have!) we'll be in a good place to add other transports. Someday Quiet could even encourage users to run Snowflake bridges! (Though we have a lot of work to do before that would be meaningful at all!) Also, thanks for saying that and for updating the comment in response to more information! People aren't always so gracious in online forums and I'm sincerely grateful.
bauruine 3y ago
Adding to this as a relay operator, while I can't speak for the Tor Project or other operators, I think this is a perfectly valid use case for Tor and I happily provide ressources for it.
- holmesworcester 3y ago
  Aw thanks!

orbital-decay 3y ago

Increased adoption also drives the volunteer amount increase. Every non-shady use of Tor is welcome, as it improves the network reputation, anonymity, and protects the use case it was created for. The more immediate issue for Tor is the vulnerability to fingerprinting if the use of Tor Browser falls below the comfortable levels.

KennyBlanken 3y ago

> HTTPS is safer than ever, and if you use ECH, DNS-over-HTTPS, and have reasonable cipher requirements for TLS, you can achieve an excellent level of privacy. Is ESNI or ECH actually in significant use?

verandaguy 3y ago
Given that it's still fairly new (just coming out of draft in the coming months), no, it's not, but it is _in_ use, and it can be deployed by server operators and client devs in its draft state. With low adoption comes the risk of flagging by bad actors on the network, but hopefully that goes away quickly after ECH comes out of draft. The silver lining of having so much of the internet controlled by massive, monolithic actors like Cloudflare and Google is that when they flip the switch on ECH, it'll be widely in use within weeks or days, not months or years; and while I don't keep up with Google's involvement, it does seem like Cloudflare's been active on the ECH front with the IETF.

rakoo 3y ago

> [Tor is] designed to protect the most vulnerable internet users out there -- people facing state censorship on the level of corporal punishment being used, for example While this is the reason Tor was created, I don't believe it's good to segregate usage based on whether we actually need that level of privacy or not. If anything, using tor when no one else uses it may decrease privacy, because you're more easily targetable. If everyone uses it all the time, it's not clear anymore whether you're using it because you actively try to protect yourself or it's just there. Just like SSL was created at a time when businesses started to get interested in the web, now TLS is used for everything and can't be used to target specific uses. Tor is like vaccines and masks: it works better if everyone uses them

wizzwizz4 3y ago
If you are running an exit node, yes. However, if the general public takes up this advice, connections will time out before the whistleblower has finished uploading the 15GiB .zip to the dead drop.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]