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From: Gizmodo:
Motherboard originally reported that the bureau has somehow managed to nab the IP address of an alleged criminal using Tor, short for "The Onion Router," as part of an ongoing anti-terrorism case. The guy in question, Muhammed Momtaz Al-Azhari, of Tampa, Florida, was charged in 2020 with attempting to provide material support to ISIS. According to the government, Al-Azhari is "an ISIS supporter who planned and attempted to carry out an attack on behalf of that terrorist organization." Part of the government's case against Al-Azhari revolves around his use of Tor to make multiple visits to an ISIS-related website prior to the planned attack. ...
It's not exactly clear what happened here. Somehow, the government ascertained Al-Azhari's real IP address—which actually turned out to be his grandma's IP address because he was staying with her in Riverside, California at the time of his arrest, court documents state. Since Tor should have protected Azhari's real location and IP address, the question remains: how did the feds get this information?
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Is use of TOR probable cause for other investigative techniques that would ordinarily violate civil liberties? (ask a warrant issuing judge.) It it any different from wearing a ski mask to the bank teller window?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday January 16 2023, @12:02PM (3 children)
Ad blocking works great. Noscript, on the other hand, is a huge pain to use. Most web sites won't work without Javascript. I am constantly allowing Javascript scripts just so I can do my job. A typical site wants to run a dozen different scripts, and the Noscript user is left to guess which ones are really needed.
Another annoyance is the incessant messaging "This site uses cookies! Agree?". I often manually delete the treacherous cookies that sites such as the nytimes use to block you and nag you to subscribe because you've reached the limit on the number of free articles you're allowed to read. Delete their cookies to reset that number. Would be better to automate that, but I do not know what browser extensions do that.
(Score: 4, Informative) by owl on Monday January 16 2023, @03:39PM
A side effect of the GDPR.
For NYT and other paywall nag schemes, it is better to just search the URL at archive.today and see if an archive copy is already present (it often is) and if not, archive it. This JS bookmarklet will automate the process of "looking up" the current URL of the page in archive.today:
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2023, @03:42PM
I work around that by writing userscripts that replicate the broken functionality in a way that gives me 100 % control over what they do. Granted, with some of the more egregious abominations out there that isn't an option unless you're willing to spend an awful amount of time on it --- and those tend to be moving targets too.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Tuesday January 17 2023, @02:24AM
I use NoScript, and do not find it to be a PITA. Most sites only need one or two servers enabled, and it's usually fairly obvious, because they have CDN or the like in the domain name. And once that scripting is enabled, usually the superfluous servers vanish from NoScript's list. And most of the ad and tracking servers are known names. On maybe one site out of a hundred, I have to do more server-fishing to locate the necessary scripting. But once it's done for a given site, I never need to do it again. On perhaps one site in a thousand I give up and resort to a different browser.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.