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A Tor Project grandee sought to correct some misconceptions about the anonymizing network during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Friday.
Roger Dingledine, one of the three founders of the Tor Project, castigated journos for mischaracterizing the pro-privacy system as a bolthole exclusively used by drug dealers and pedophiles to hide from the authorities.
In fact, he said, only three per cent of Tor users connect to hidden services, suggesting the vast majority of folks on the network are using it to anonymously browse public websites for completely legit purposes. In other words, netizens – from journalists to activists to normal peeps – use Tor to mask their identities from website owners, and it's not just underworld villains.
Dingledine even went as far as saying the dark web – a landscape of websites concealed within networks like Tor – is so insignificant, it can be discounted.
Only 3%, but what a 3% it is, eh?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @06:59AM (5 children)
I think he's wrong.
He should be looking at money: how much money is connected to "legitimate" traffic, and how much is connected to provably illegal behavior?
It's a lot like political donations in the US: many individuals donated to Bernie Sanders, but Hillary Clinton got more money.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @03:10PM
Why?
How?
In sum, WTF?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @04:42PM (3 children)
If you want to regulate internet commerce so you have an extra law to go after the drug dealers with, fine, whatever. I'm a (bleeding-heart) libertarian and would be opposed to on principle, but whatever. The USA is a country full of authoritarians who want government interference in their daily lives and want to have to ask the government for permission to love somebody! And this makes people happy! Whatever. I digress.
The only commercial entities the web requires are ISPs. As long as everybody is paying their ISP in full on time, that's all that we should care about. The internet (not just the web) should be a global information and communication network for the betterment of this species. Those goals do not necessarily imply commerce. I think in an ideal world, the lion's share of the internet should be people freely (gratis) providing information to other people from their own hardware (or rented virtual machine) and using their own hardware (or rented virtual machine) to create distributed/federated communication services. (XMPP! Rise from your grave! It's not too late! Whargarbl! Etc!)
What Dingledine (suddenly I don't feel so self-conscious about my own last name) is noting is that the majority of users are using TOR for reasons that are orthogonal to commerce. His analysis fundamentally disagrees with the analysis you propose. Your analysis may very well show that the majority of commerce on TOR is of an illegal nature in the USA. You'd get different numbers considering different jurisdictions such as Canada, Iran, North Korea, Germany, etc. We even have a user here (iirc who that is) [soylentnews.org] who has mentioned that he restrains his speech while logged in because certain speech is illegal (criticizing foreign leaders) in his jurisdiction that afaik is legal in the USA. My point is that your analysis will give us a metric that only the type of personality who becomes one of Altemeyer's right-wing authoritarians (or an SJW for an example on the “left”) would care about.
Certainly we have authoritarians here, but do we really want the internet to serve big government and the political winds of the day? If we decide that we do, please keep in mind that sooner or later the USA is going to have somebody from the other sports team in charge of the Oval Office. Do you really want to give a, er, Kenyan Muslim (…) the authority to shut down TOR because criticizing, say, the transsexual New World Order becomes illegal?
Remember that “illegal” is a human construct only and has little to do with any system of ethics—it's literally “might makes right” and legal/illegal is a totally arbitrary distinction… you can see the violently imposed monopoly guy's posts for a proposal for an alternative, albeit imnhso fundamentally flawed, system humans could use to better approximate ethics instead of the arbitrary notion of legality.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @07:15PM (1 child)
I didn't argue that Tor should be shut down, or that it should be crippled in any way to prevent illegal activities.
I just reread the summary, and I realized there are two statements:
1) Tor is not being used exclusively by "bad people". True.
2) The dark web has so little traffic, it's insignificant. This I think is wrong.
For (2) a value judgement is made, saying that significance is proportional to number of bytes transfered.
My opinion is that significance should be proportional to amount of money changing hands instead.
Obviously we can then debate whether the definition of "illegal activity" is correct, we can argue whether or not we should be allowed to check what is happening on the dark web (for instance i'm confident that if someone drove around town in a convertible filled with gold bricks, the cops would stop them to ask for proof that the bricks belong to them).
However, even for an ideal police force, the element of interest in any social network is who is paying who for what services, rather than how big the receipts used for said transfers are (i.e. I pay netflix ~15 euros a month for many many gigabytes, but my neighbour could be paying ~15 euros for the couple of dozen bytes containing a credit card number).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @11:44PM
"for instance i'm confident that if someone drove around town in a convertible filled with gold bricks, the cops would stop them to ask for proof that the bricks belong to them"
i'm sure you're right (especially with so many law-loving suck asses around) but that would be an unconstitutional stop. doesn't meet reasonable suspicion requirements.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday July 31 2017, @08:01PM
the links are obfuscated so it would be difficult to automate visiting them, but are trivial for humans to resolve:
http soylentnews org
h__p://soylentnews.org
Text in bitmap images. I even found one on Last.fm.
There are vast quantities of all three of these. Often they use a "link protection service" to hide the referring page.
Most of it is available for download on oron.com and the like. Most such downloads require a paid account. The uploader gets a portion of that money - so you can get paid real money if you make kiddieporn available on the open web.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]