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The Daily Dot has a story about a browser vendor who wants to package Tor as part of its private browsing mode. From the article:
Several major tech firms are in talks with Tor to include the software in products that can potentially reach over 500 million Internet users around the world. One particular firm wants to include Tor as a “private browsing mode” in a mainstream Web browser, allowing users to easily toggle connectivity to the Tor anonymity network on and off.
“They very much like Tor Browser and would like to ship it to their customer base,” Tor executive director Andrew Lewman wrote, explaining the discussions but declining to name the specific company. “Their product is 10-20 percent of the global market, this is of roughly 2.8 billion global Internet users.”
The author elaborates:
The product that best fits Lewman’s description by our estimation is Mozilla Firefox, the third-most popular Web browser online today and home to, you guessed it, 10 to 20 percent of global Internet users.
The story appears to have gleaned most of its information from a tor-dev mailing list post. An interesting reply from Tor developer Mike Perry explains how Tor can be modified so that the network can handle the extra load.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 30 2014, @03:07PM
Also the most common use for encryption / vpn services (im a sysadmin for a VPN company) is for porn.
How do you figure that? Are you talking about people in countries where porn is illegal? Or people surfing porn at work?
I can't really see them being anywhere near the volume of bittorrent piracy users. Perhaps your VPN company targets a niche demographic?
(Score: 2) by cykros on Wednesday October 01 2014, @07:36PM
It sounds like he's figuring it based on logs.
As for "niche demographic", it may just be that he's working for a VPN that isn't particularly pirate friendly. Not all of them will just turn a blind eye to piracy, and some will happily drop you like a bad habit for breaching terms of service.
Others do things like run the whole system in RAM and keep no logs. If THOSE had more porn use than piracy (and it was for legal porn), you'd definitely have to color me surprised.