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posted by martyb on Monday April 20 2015, @02:53AM   Printer-friendly
from the why-is-everyone-watching-me? dept.

Ars Technica recently reviewed two "Tor routers", devices that are supposed to improve your privacy by routing all traffic through the Tor anonymity network. Although the initial release of Anonabox proved woefully insecure, the basic premise itself is flawed. Using these instead of the Tor Browser Bundle is bad: less secure and less private than simply not using these "Tor Routers" in the first place. They are, in a word, EPICFAIL.

There are four possible spies on your traffic when you use these Tor "routers", those who can both see what you do and potentially attack your communication: your ISP, the websites themselves, the Tor exit routers, and the NSA with its 5EYES buddies.

Now it's true that these devices do protect you against your ISP. And if your ISP wants to extort over $30 per month for them to not spy on you, this does offer protection. But if you want protection from your ISP, just use a VPN service or run your own VPN using Amazon EC2 ($9.50/month plus $.09/GB bandwidth for a t2 micro instance). These services offer much better performance and equal privacy. At the same time, if your ISP wants to extort your privacy, choose a different ISP.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/04/op-ed-why-the-entire-premise-of-tor-enabled-routers-is-ridiculous/

 
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by morgauxo on Monday April 20 2015, @03:47PM

    by morgauxo (2082) on Monday April 20 2015, @03:47PM (#173157)

    If you use a VPN to prevent your ISP from spying on you then how are you not giving the provider of the VPN the very same ability to spy on you that you are taking from the ISP?

    I don't believe that you can know 100% for sure that a provider (ISP or VPN) does NOT spy on you. You might know that a provider DOES spy on it's customers through some Snowden revelation or something like that so I guess in that case using a VPN may be an improvement but I don't see how it really plugs the hole.

    I would especially mis-trust big name providers because having more customers means they NSA or whoever has all the more reason to target them. Summary suggests Amazon. Has a big name company like Amazon really been ignored by all the hackers and all the alphabet soup agencies? Please... the NSA probably has two copies of everything at Amazon, one that they purchased from Amazon for a sum that no sane executives could have turned down and another that they obtained through various forms of wire tapping.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @04:51PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 20 2015, @04:51PM (#173183)

    You can pay a VPN provider with an anonymous form of payment, like a pre-paid debit card, some even take gift-cards from places like walmart.

    Ultimately there is no such thing as 100% certainty whenever you rely on someone else to provide a service. But black and white thinking only leads to zero security. Unlike the ISPs that most people use, VPNs have competition and they have less incentive to abuse their customers. They may still be subject to national security letters and NSA infilitration, but that doesn't mean they are going to actively sell your browsing information in the way verizon (supercookies) and att do. [techdirt.com]