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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: 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.