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Microsoft revealed several AI features at Build 2024, but the highlight was Recall. Similar to Rewind, an app for the Mac I tried in December 2023, Recall can help Windows users find anything they've seen, heard, or opened on their PC. This includes files, documents, and apps, but also images, videos, and audio. Recall defaults to a scrollable timeline, which is broken up into discrete events detected by Recall, but users can also browse with semantic text search.

It's a simple feature to use, but its implications are vast. If Recall works as advertised, it could fundamentally change how people interact with Windows PCs. There's arguably little need to organize photos from a vacation or carefully file away notes if Recall can find anything, and everything, you've opened on your PC.

"It used to be if you interacted with your PC, you used a command line. Then we came up with the graphical user interface," said Ostrum. "Now, how do you find the things that you are looking for? Recall is a much more natural and richer way to interact with your files."

There's one unavoidable caveat: It's too early to know if Recall will do what Microsoft says. I tried the feature firsthand, and found that it could recall a fictional recipe I asked Microsoft Copilot to create. It did so immediately, and also after several hours had passed. Whether it can do the same next month, or next year, remains to be seen.

While Recall was the star, it was joined by several additional AI features. These include Cocreator, a new feature for Microsoft Paint that uses AI to convert simple sketches into more elaborate digital art, and Live Captions, which captions and translates video in real time. Like Recall, both features lean on a Copilot+ PC's neural processing unit (NPU). That means these features, again like Recall, won't be available on older PCs.

These features are intriguing, but they're shadowed by a concern: privacy. Recall could help you find lost documents, and live translation could lower language barriers, but they only work if Microsoft's AI captures what's happening on your PC. The company hopes to ease these concerns by running AI models on-device and encrypting any data that's stored.

Qualcomm partnership leaves Intel, AMD in the cold

Of course, running an AI model on-device isn't easy. CPUs can handle some AI models, but performance often isn't ideal, and many AI models aren't optimized for the hardware. GPUs are better fit for AI workloads but can draw a lot of power, which shortens battery life.

That's where Qualcomm comes into the picture. Its latest laptop chip, the Snapdragon X Elite, was designed by many of the same engineers responsible for Apple's M1 chip and includes an NPU.

Microsoft's two Copilot+ PCs, the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro, both have Snapdragon X Elite processors, and both quote AI performance of up to 45 trillion operations per second. Intel's current Intel Core Ultra processors are a step behind, with quoted AI performance up to 34 trillion operations per second.

That's apparently not enough for Microsoft: All Copilot+ PCs available at launch on 18 June will have Qualcomm chips inside. And many new AI features, including Windows' Recall, only work on Copilot+ PCs. Put simply: If you want to use Recall, you must buy Qualcomm.

Intel and AMD chips will appear in Copilot+ PCs eventually, but Ostrum said that may not happen until the end of 2024 or early 2025.

"We will continue to partner with [Intel and AMD] when it makes sense," said Ostrum. "There is both an element of how much performance there is, but there's also an element of how efficient that performance is [...] we don't want [AI] to be taxing multiple hours of battery life at a given time." Ostrum says activating AI features like Windows' Recall on a Copilot+ PC shaves no more than 30 to 40 minutes off a laptop's battery life, and all of Microsoft's battery-life quotes for Surface devices (which promise up to 15 hours of Web browsing and 22 hours of video playback) assume Copilot+ AI features are turned on.

It's unusual to see a major Windows product launch without Intel at the forefront of it, but that underscores Microsoft's belief that features like Recall only work on hardware that prioritizes AI performance and efficiency. If Microsoft has it their way, the Copilot key won't be a fad. It'll be the most important key on every Windows PC.

So, are you getting one or staying as far as away as you can?

Original Submission

1. Tor is compromised (and not anonymous)

That governments can de-anonymize Tor users is another well-known point that's been acknowledged for years. In 2013 the Washington Post broke an article citing reports that US government agencies had figured out how to de-anonymize Tor users on a "wide scale". From the Washington Post:

Since 2006, according to a 49-page research paper titled simply "Tor," the agency has worked on several methods that, if successful, would allow the NSA to uncloak anonymous traffic on a "wide scale" — effectively by watching communications as they enter and exit the Tor system, rather than trying to follow them inside. One type of attack, for example, would identify users by minute differences in the clock times on their computers.

There are also reports of government agencies cooperating with researchers to "break" or somehow exploit Tor to de-anonymize users:

Then in July, a much anticipated talk at the Black Hat hacking conference was abruptly canceled. Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, academics from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), promised to reveal how a $3,000 piece of kit could unmask the IP addresses of Tor hidden services as well as their users.

Its description bore a startling resemblance to the attack the Tor Project had documented earlier that month. Volynkin and McCord's method would deanonymize Tor users through the use of recently disclosed vulnerabilities and a "handful of powerful servers." On top of this, the pair claimed they had tested attacks in the wild.

For $3,000 worth of hardware, this team from Carnegie Mellon could effectively "unmask" Tor users. And this was in 2015. But a 2017 court case proves FBI can de-anonymize Tor users. "The means by which the FBI is able to de-anonymize Tor users and discover their real IP address remains classified information. In a 2017 court case, the FBI refused to divulge how it was able to do this, which ultimately led to child abusers on the Tor network going free."

From the Tech Times:

In this case, the FBI managed to breach the anonymity Tor promises and the means used to collect the evidence from the dark web make up a sensitive matter. The technique is valuable to the FBI, so the government would rather compromise this case rather than release the source code it used. "The government must now choose between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of its indictment," federal prosecutor Annette Hayes said in a court filing on Friday.

The cat is out of the bag. The FBI (and presumably other government agencies) has proven to be fully capable of de-anonymizing Tor users. Most Tor promoters simply ignore these different cases and the obvious implications.

2. Tor developers are cooperating with US government agencies

Some Tor users may be surprised to know the extent to which Tor developers are working directly with US government agencies. After all, Tor is often promoted as a grass-roots privacy effort to help you stay "anonymous" against Big Brother. One journalist was able to clarify this cooperation through FOIA requests, which revealed many interesting exchanges.

Here is one email correspondence in which Roger Dingledine discusses cooperation with the DOJ (Department of Justice) and FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), while also referencing "backdoors" being installed.

Tor developer Steven Murdoch discovered a vulnerability with the way Tor was handling TLS encryption. This vulnerability made it easier to de-anonymize Tor users, and as such, it would be valuable to government agencies. Knowing the problems this could cause, Steven suggested keeping the document internal,

...it might be a good to delay the release of anything like 'this attack is bad; I hope nobody realizes it before we fix it'.

Eight days later, Roger Dingledine alerted two government agents about this vulnerability. While there is disagreement as to the seriousness of these issues, one thing remains clear. Tor developers are closely working with the US government. [...] Whether or not you agree with the ultimate conclusion of this researcher, the facts remain for anyone who wants to acknowledge them. The big issue is the close cooperation between Tor developers and US government agencies.

And if you really want to dive in, check out the full FOIA cache here.

3. When you use Tor, you stand out like a glow stick

Meet Eldo Kim. He was the Harvard student who assumed Tor would make him "anonymous" when sending bomb threats. Kim didn't realize that when he connected to Tor on the university network, he would stand out like a [...]glow stick. The FBI and the network admins at Harvard were able to easily pinpoint Kim because he was using Tor around the time the bomb threat email was sent through the Tor network. From the criminal complaint:

Harvard University was able to determine that, in the several hours leading up to the receipt of the e-mail messages described above, ELDO KIM accessed TOR using Harvard's wireless network.

Eldo Kim is just one of many, many examples of people who have bought into the lie that Tor provides blanket online anonymity – and later paid the price. Had Kim used a bridge or VPN before accessing the Tor network, he probably would have gotten away with it (we'll discuss this more below).

4. Anybody can operate Tor nodes and collect your data and IP address

Many proponents of Tor argue that its decentralized nature is a benefit. While there are indeed advantages to decentralization, there are also some major risks. Namely, that anybody can operate the Tor nodes through which your traffic is being routed. There have been numerous examples of people setting up Tor nodes to collect data from gullible Tor users who thought they would be safe and secure. Take for example Dan Egerstad, a 22-year-old Swedish hacker. Egerstad set up a few Tor nodes around the world and collected vast amounts of private data in just a few months:

In time, Egerstad gained access to 1000 high-value email accounts. He would later post 100 sets of sensitive email logins and passwords on the internet for criminals, spies or just curious teenagers to use to snoop on inter-governmental, NGO and high-value corporate email.

The question on everybody's lips was: how did he do it? The answer came more than a week later and was somewhat anti-climactic. The 22-year-old Swedish security consultant had merely installed free, open-source software – called Tor – on five computers in data centres around the globe and monitored it. Ironically, Tor is designed to prevent intelligence agencies, corporations and computer hackers from determining the virtual – and physical – location of the people who use it.

People think they're protected just because they use Tor. Not only do they think it's encrypted, but they also think 'no one can find me'.

To not assume government agencies are doing this right now would be extremely naive. Commenting on this case, security consultant Sam Stover emphasized the risks of someone snooping traffic through Tor nodes:

Domestic, or international . . . if you want to do intelligence gathering, there's definitely data to be had there. (When using Tor) you have no idea if some guy in China is watching all your traffic, or some guy in Germany, or a guy in Illinois. You don't know.

In fact, that is exactly how Wikileaks got started. The founders simply setup Tor nodes to siphon off more than a million private documents. According to Wired:

WikiLeaks, the controversial whistleblowing site that exposes secrets of governments and corporations, bootstrapped itself with a cache of documents obtained through an internet eavesdropping operation by one of its activists, according to a new profile of the organization's founder.

The activist siphoned more than a million documents as they traveled across the internet through Tor, also known as "The Onion Router," a sophisticated privacy tool that lets users navigate and send documents through the internet anonymously.

Are governments running Tor nodes for bulk data collection?

Egerstad also suggests Tor nodes may be controlled by powerful agencies (governments) with vast resources:

In addition to hackers using Tor to hide their origins, it's plausible that intelligence services had set up rogue exit nodes to sniff data from the Tor network. "If you actually look in to where these Tor nodes are hosted and how big they are, some of these nodes cost thousands of dollars each month just to host because they're using lots of bandwidth, they're heavy-duty servers and so on," Egerstad says. "Who would pay for this and be anonymous?"

Back in 2014, government agencies seized a number of different Tor relays in what is known as "Operation Onymous". From the Tor Project blog:

Over the last few days, we received and read reports saying that several Tor relays were seized by government officials. We do not know why the systems were seized, nor do we know anything about the methods of investigation which were used. Specifically, there are reports that three systems of Torservers.net disappeared and there is another report by an independent relay operator.

This issue continues to gain attention. In this Gizmodo article from 2021, we find the same problems. Bad actors can and do operate Tor nodes. Additional reading: A mysterious threat actor is running hundreds of malicious Tor relays

The fundamental issue here is there is no real quality control mechanism for vetting Tor relay operators. Not only is there no authentication mechanism for setting up relays, but the operators themselves can also remain anonymous. Assuming that some Tor nodes are data collection tools, it would also be safe to assume that many different governments are involved in data collection, such as the Chinese, Russian, and US governments.

See also: Tor network exit nodes found to be sniffing passing traffic

5. Malicious Tor nodes do exist

If government-controlled Tor nodes weren't bad enough, you also have to consider malicious Tor nodes.

In 2016 a group of researchers presented a paper titled "HOnions: Towards Detection and Identification of Misbehaving Tor HSDirs" [PDF], which described how they identified 110 malicious Tor relays:

Over the last decade privacy infrastructures such as Tor proved to be very successful and widely used. However, Tor remains a practical system with a variety of limitations and open to abuse. Tor's security and anonymity is based on the assumption that the large majority of the its relays are honest and do not misbehave. Particularly the privacy of the hidden services is dependent on the honest operation of Hidden Services Directories (HSDirs). In this work we introduce, the concept of honey onions (HOnions), a framework to detect and identify misbehaving and snooping HSDirs. After the deployment of our system and based on our experimental results during the period of 72 days, we detect and identify at least 110 such snooping relays. Furthermore, we reveal that more than half of them were hosted on cloud infrastructure and delayed the use of the learned information to prevent easy traceback.

The malicious HSDirs identified by the team were mostly located in the United States, Germany, France, United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Just a few months after the HSDir issue broke, a different researcher identified a malicious Tor node injecting malware into file downloads.

Use at your own risk.

See also:

OnionDuke APT Malware Distributed Via Malicious Tor Exit Node

6. No warrant necessary to spy on Tor users

Another interesting case highlighting the flaws of Tor comes form 2016 when the FBI was able to infiltrate Tor to bust another pedophile group. According to Tech Times:

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) can still spy on users who use the Tor browser to remain anonymous on the web. Senior U.S. District Court Judge Henry Coke Morgan, Jr. has ruled that the FBI does not need a warrant to hack into a U.S. citizen's computer system. The ruling by the district judge relates to FBI sting called Operation Pacifier, which targeted a child pornography site called PlayPen on the Dark web. The accused used Tor to access these websites. The federal agency, with the help of hacking tools on computers in Greece, Denmark, Chile and the U.S., was able to catch 1,500 pedophiles during the operation.

While it's great to see these types of criminals getting shut down, this case also highlights the severe vulnerabilities of Tor as a privacy tool that can be trusted by journalists, political dissidents, whistleblowers, etc. The judge in this case officially ruled [PDF] that Tor users lack "a reasonable expectation of privacy" in hiding their IP address and identity. This essentially opens the door to any US government agency being able to spy on Tor users without obtaining a warrant or going through any legal channels.

This, of course, is a serious concern when you consider that journalists, activists, and whistleblowers are encouraged to use Tor to hide from government agencies and mass surveillance.

7. Tor was created by the US government (and not for your "right to privacy")

If you think Tor was created for "privacy rights" or some other noble-sounding cause, then you would be mistaken. The quote below, from the co-founder of Tor, speaks volumes.

I forgot to mention earlier, probably something that will make you look at me in a new light. I contract for the United States Government to build anonymity technology for them and deploy it. They don't think of it as anonymity technology, though we use that term. They think of it as security technology. They need these technologies so that they can research people they're interested in, so that they can have anonymous tip lines, so that they can buy things from people without other countries figuring out what they are buying, how much they are buying and where it is going, that sort of thing.

— Roger Dingledine, co-founder of Tor, 2004 speech

This quote alone should convince any rational person to never use the Tor network, unless of course you want to be rubbing shoulders with government spooks on the Dark Web.

The history of Tor goes back to the 1990s when the Office of Naval Research and DARPA were working to create an online anonymity network in Washington, DC. This network was called "onion routing" and bounced traffic across different nodes before exiting to the final destination.

In 2002, the Alpha version of Tor was developed and released by Paul Syverson (Office of Naval Research), as well as Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson, who were both on contract with DARPA. This three-person team, working for the US government, developed Tor into what it is today.

The quote above was taken from a 2004 speech by Roger Dingledine, which you can also listen to here.

After Tor was developed and released for public use, it was eventually spun off as its own non-profit organization, with guidance coming from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF):

At the very end of 2004, with Tor technology finally ready for deployment, the US Navy cut most of its Tor funding, released it under an open source license and, oddly, the project was handed over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

8. Tor is funded by the US government

It's no secret that Tor is funded by various US government agencies. The key question is whether US government funding negatively affects Tor's independence and trustworthiness as a privacy tool.

Some journalists have closely examined the financial relationship between Tor and the US government:

Tor had always maintained that it was funded by a "variety of sources" and was not beholden to any one interest group. But I crunched the numbers and found that the exact opposite was true: In any given year, Tor drew between 90 to 100 percent of its budget via contracts and grants coming from three military-intel branches of the federal government: the Pentagon, the State Department and an old school CIA spinoff organization called the BBG.

Put simply: the financial data showed that Tor wasn't the indie-grassroots anti-state org that it claimed to be. It was a military contractor. It even had its own official military contractor reference number from the government.

Here are some of the different government funding sources for the Tor Project over the years:

Broadcasting Board of Governors:

"Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) [now called U.S. Agency for Global Media], a federal agency that was spun off from the CIA and today oversees America's foreign broadcasting operations, funded Tor to the tune of $6.1 million in the years from 2007 through 2015." (source)

State Department:

"The State Department funded Tor to the tune of $3.3 million, mostly through its regime change arm — State Dept's "Democracy, Human Rights and Labor" division." (source)

The Pentagon:

"From 2011 through 2013, the Pentagon funded Tor to the tune of $2.2 million, through a U.S. Department of Defense / Navy contract — passed through a defense contractor called SRI International." (source)

The grant is called: "Basic and Applied Research and Development in Areas Relating to the Navy Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance."

We can also see what the Tor project has to say about the matter. When soliciting funds in 2005, Tor claimed that donors would be able to "influence" the direction of the project:

We are now actively looking for new contracts and funding. Sponsors of Tor get personal attention, better support, publicity (if they want it), and get to influence the direction of our research and development!

There you have it. Tor claims donors influence the direction of research and development – a fact that the Tor team even admits. Do you really think the US government would invest millions of dollars into a tool that stifled its power?

9. When you use Tor, you help the US government do spooky stuff

The United States government can't simply run an anonymity system for everybody and then use it themselves only. Because then every time a connection came from it people would say, "Oh, it's another CIA agent looking at my website," if those are the only people using the network. So you need to have other people using the network so they blend together.

—Roger Dingledine, co-founder of the Tor Network, 2004 speech

The implications of this statement are quite serious. When you use Tor, you are literally helping the US government. Your traffic helps to conceal CIA agents who are also using Tor, as Dingledine and journalists are pointing out.

Just as Roger Dingledine asserted in the opening quote to this section, Paul Syverson (Tor co-founder) also emphasized the importance of getting other people to use Tor, thereby helping government agents perform their work and not stand out as the only Tor users:

If you have a system that's only a Navy system, anything popping out of it is obviously from the Navy. You need to have a network that carries traffic for other people as well.

Tor is branded by many different individuals and groups as a grassroots project to protect people from government surveillance. In reality, however, it is a tool for government agents who are literally using it for military and intelligence operations (including spying on those who think they are "anonymous" on Tor).

Tor's utility for the military-surveillance apparatus is explained well in the following quote:

Tor was created not to protect the public from government surveillance, but rather, to cloak the online identity of intelligence agents as they snooped on areas of interest. But in order to do that, Tor had to be released to the public and used by as diverse a group of people as possible: activists, dissidents, journalists, paranoiacs, kiddie porn scum, criminals and even would-be terrorists — the bigger and weirder the crowd, the easier it would be for agents to mix in and hide in plain sight.

According to these Tor developers and co-founders, when you use Tor you are helping US government agents in doing whatever they do on the Tor network. Why would anyone who advocates for privacy and human rights want to do that?

10. IP address leaks when using Tor

Another recurring problem with Tor is IP address leaks – a serious issue that will de-anonymize Tor users, even if the leak is brief.

In November 2017 a flaw was discovered that exposed the real IP address of Tor users if they clicked on a local file-based address, such as file://., rather than http:// or https://.

This issue illustrates a larger problem with Tor: it only encrypts traffic through the Tor browser, thereby leaving all other (non-Tor browser) traffic exposed.

Unlike a VPN that encrypts all traffic on your operating system, the Tor network only works through a browser configured for Tor. (See the 'what is a VPN' guide for an overview.)

This design leaves Tor users vulnerable to leaks which will expose their identity in many different situations:

• Tor offers no protection when torrenting and will leak the user's IP address with torrent clients.
• Tor may leak IP addresses when accessing files, such as PDFs or other documents, which will likely bypass proxy settings.
• Windows users are also vulnerable to different types of leaks that will expose the user's real IP address.

It's important to note, however, that oftentimes de-anonymization is due to user error or misconfiguration. Therefore blame does not lie with Tor itself, but rather with people not using Tor correctly.

Dan Eggerstad emphasized this issue as well when he stated:

People think they're protected just because they use Tor. Not only do they think it's encrypted, but they also think 'no one can find me'. But if you've configured your computer wrong, which probably more than 50 per cent of the people using Tor have, you can still find the person (on) the other side.

Once again, non-technical users would be better off using a good VPN service that provides system-wide traffic encryption and an effective kill switch to block all traffic if the VPN connection drops.

11. Using Tor can make you a target

As we saw above with the bomb threat hoax, Eldo Kim was targeted because he was on the Tor network when the bomb threat was sent. Other security experts also warn about Tor users being targeted merely for using Tor.

In addition, most really repressive places actually look for Tor and target those people. VPNs are used to watch Netflix and Hulu, but Tor has only one use case – to evade the authorities. There is no cover. (This is assuming it is being used to evade even in a country incapable of breaking Tor anonymity.)

In many ways Tor can be riskier than a VPN:

1. VPNs are (typically) not actively malicious
2. VPNs provide good cover that Tor simply cannot – "I was using it to watch Hulu videos" is much better than – "I was just trying to buy illegal drugs online"

As we've pointed out here before, VPNs are more widely used than Tor – and for various (legitimate) reasons, such as streaming Netflix with a VPN.

So maybe you still need (or want?) to use Tor. How can you do so with more safety?

How hide your IP address when using Tor

Given that Tor is compromised and bad actors can see the real IP address of Tor users, it would be wise to take extra precautions. This includes hiding your real IP address before accessing the Tor network.

To hide your IP address when accessing Tor, simply connect to a VPN server (through a VPN client on your computer) and then access Tor as normal (such as through the Tor browser). This will add a layer of encryption between your computer and the Tor network, with the VPN server's IP address replacing your real IP address.

Note: There are different ways to combine VPNs and Tor. I am only recommending the following setup: You VPN Tor Internet (also called "Tor over VPN" or "Onion over VPN").

With this setup, even if a malicious actor was running a Tor server and logging all connecting IP addresses, your real IP address would remain hidden behind the VPN server (assuming you are using a good VPN with no leaks).

Here are the benefits of routing your traffic through a secure VPN before the Tor network:

1. Your real IP address remains hidden from the Tor network (Tor cannot see who you are)
2. Your internet provider (ISP) or network admin will not be able to see you are using Tor (because your traffic is being encrypted through a VPN server).
3. You won't stand out as much from other users because VPNs are more popular than Tor.
4. You are distributing trust between Tor and a VPN. The VPN could see your IP address and Tor could see your traffic (sites you visit), but neither would have both your IP address and browsing activities.

For anyone distrustful of VPNs, there are a handful of verified no logs VPN services that have been proven to be truly "no logs".

You can sign up for a VPN with a secure anonymous email account (not connected to your identity). For the truly paranoid, you can also pay with Bitcoin or any other anonymous payment method. Most VPNs do not require any name for registration, only a valid email address for account credentials. Using a VPN in a safe offshore jurisdiction (outside the 14 Eyes) may also be good, depending on your threat model.

For those seeking the highest levels of anonymity, you can chain multiple VPNs through Linux virtual machines (using Virtualbox, which is FOSS). You could also use VPN1 on your router, VPN2 on your computer, and then access the regular internet (or the Tor network) through two layers of encryption via two separate VPN services. This allows you to distribute trust across different VPN services and ensure neither VPN could have both your incoming IP address and traffic. This is discussed more in my guide on multi-hop VPN services.

Note: The claim that "VPN is fully, 100%, a single point/entity that you must trust" is false. This claim comes from this Tor promoter who coincidentlyworks for the US government's Naval Research Lab.

When you chain VPNs, you can distribute trust across different VPN services and different jurisdictions around the world, all paid for anonymously and not linked to your identity. With Tor alone, you put all your trust in The Onion Router...

Tor vulnerabilities and VPNs

There are other attacks that the Tor Project admits will de-anonymize Tor users (archived):

As mentioned above, it is possible for an observer who can view both you and either the destination website or your Tor exit node to correlate timings of your traffic as it enters the Tor network and also as it exits. Tor does not defend against such a threat model.

Once again, a VPN can help to mitigate the risk of de-anonymization by hiding your source IP address before accessing the guard node in the Tor circuit.

Can exit nodes eavesdrop on communications? From the Tor Project:

Yes, the guy running the exit node can read the bytes that come in and out there. Tor anonymizes the origin of your traffic, and it makes sure to encrypt everything inside the Tor network, but it does not magically encrypt all traffic throughout the Internet.

However, a VPN can not do anything about a bad Tor exit node eavesdropping on your traffic, although it will help hide who you are (but your traffic can also give you away).

Conclusion

No privacy tool is above criticism.

Just like with Tor, I have also pointed out numerous problems with VPNs, including VPNs that were caught lying about logs, VPN scams, and dangerous free VPN services. All privacy tools come with pros and cons. Selecting the best tool for the job all boils down to your threat model and unique needs.

Unfortunately, for many in the privacy community, Tor is now considered to be an infallible tool for blanket anonymity, and to question this dogma means you are "spreading FUD". This is pathetic.

In closing, for regular users seeking more security and online anonymity, I'd simply avoid Tor altogether. A VPN will offer system-wide encryption, much faster speeds, and user-friendly clients for various devices and operating systems. This will also prevent your ISP from seeing what you're up to online.

Additionally, VPNs are more mainstream and there are many legitimate (and legal!) reasons for using them. Compared to Tor, you definitely won't stand out as much with a VPN.

For those who still want to access the Tor network, doing so through a reliable VPN service will add an extra layer of protection while hiding your real IP address.

Further Reading:

Tor and its Discontents: Problems with Tor Usage as Panacea

Users Get Routed: Traffic Correlation on Tor by Realistic Adversaries

Tor network exit nodes found to be sniffing passing traffic

On the Effectiveness of Traffic Analysis Against Anonymity Networks Using Flow Records

Judge confirms what many suspected: Feds hired CMU to break Tor

Original Submission

[...] But what is happening in the body and mind of a person who does not seem to feel the pain they "should" be feeling. Do we all have the capacity to be one of these heroic freaks?

And how did John Sattler play those 77 minutes?

Questions like these rattled around the mind of Lorimer Moseley when he showed up at Sydney's Royal North Shore hospital years ago as an undergraduate physiotherapy student. He wanted to interrogate a quip made by a neurology professor as he left the lecture theatre one day, that the worst injuries are often the least painful. So Moseley sat in the emergency room and watched people come in, recording their injuries and asking them how much they hurt.

"And this guy came in with a hammer stuck in his neck – the curly bit had got in the back and was coming out the front and blood was pouring all down," Moseley recalls. "But he was relaxed. He just walked in holding the hammer, relaxed. Totally fine."

Then the man turned around, hit his knee on a low table and began jumping up and down at the pain of the small knock.

"And I think, 'Whoa, what is happening there?'"

The curious student ruled out drugs, alcohol, shock. He realised that the reason the man did not feel pain from his hammer injury was due to the very point of pain itself.

"Pain is a feeling that motivates us to protect ourselves," says Moseley, now the chair in physiotherapy and a professor of clinical neurosciences at the University of South Australia.

"One of the beautiful things about pain is that it will motivate us to protect the body part that's in danger, really anatomically specific – it can narrow it right down to a tiny little spot."

[...] Prof Michael Nicholas is used to stories like these. "You can see it in probably every hospital ward. If you stay around long enough you'll hear comments like 'this person has more pain than they should have' or 'you might be surprised that they're not in pain'," he says. "What that highlights to me is the general tendency for all of us to think there should be a close relationship between a stimulus like an injury or a noxious event and the degree of pain the person feels.

"In fact, that's generally wrong. But it doesn't stop us believing it."

The reason we get it wrong, Nicholas says, "is that we have a sort of mind-body problem".

Eastern medicine and philosophy has long recognised the interconnectedness of body and mind, and so too did the west in early civilisations. In ancient Greece the Algea, the gods of physical pain, were also gods associated with psychic pain – with grief and distress. But in the 1600s the French philosopher René Descartes set western thinking on a different course, asserting that the mind and body were separate entities.

"When people come to see me, they're often worried they're being told it's all in their head," Nicholas says.

"Of course pain is in your head. It's in your brain. You know, it's the brain that is where you get that experience ... It's never all physical."

This is true of people who tolerate acute pain. It's never all physical. And it has little to do with heroism or freakishness.

[...] And so the experience of acute pain is caught in the realm of mystery and mythology; where we can understand much of what is happening in a body and part of what is happening in a brain but never actually know what another person feels.

The legend of John Sattler goes that after that fateful right hook from Bucknall, the bloodied captain turned to his teammate Matthew Cleary. That no one knew, perhaps not even himself, the damage that had been done to him became his mythological power.

"Hold me up," he said. "So they don't know I'm hurt."

Original Submission

So Marchant and Cox looked at whether the decline in cloud brightness corresponded with areas with falling levels of SO2 pollution, and found that it did. The pair presented their preliminary results at the Exeter Climate Forum earlier this month.

The results are encouraging because the rapid warming in recent years has led some researchers to suggest that Earth’s climate sensitivity – how much it warms in response to a given increase in atmospheric CO2 – is on the high side of estimates. As it turns out, extra warming due to falling pollution will be short-lived, whereas if the cloud darkening was a feedback caused by rising CO2, it would mean ever more warming due to this as CO2 levels keep rising.

“If this darkening is a change in cloud properties due to the recent decrease in SO2 emissions, rather than a change in cloud feedbacks that indicate a higher-than-anticipated climate sensitivity, then this is great news,” says Laura Wilcox at the University of Reading in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.

There are some limitations with the datasets Marchant and Cox used, says Wilcox. For instance, the data on SO2 pollution has been updated since the team did their analysis.

And two recent studies have suggested the darkening is mainly due to a reduction in cloud cover, rather than darker clouds, she says. “The drivers of the recent darkening trends are a hotly debated topic at the moment.”

Overall, though, Wilcox says her own work also supports the conclusion that the recent acceleration in global warming has been primarily driven by the decrease in air pollution, and that it is likely to be a temporary effect.

Original Submission

[...] Comcast seems to have noticed, Herman said. "They've been calling our clients nonstop to try to come back to their service, offer them discounted rates for a five-year contract and so on," he said.

A Comcast spokesperson told Ars that "we have upgraded our network in this area and offer multi-gig speeds there, and across Michigan, as part of our national upgrade that has been rolling out."

Meanwhile, Comcast's controversial data caps are being phased out. With Comcast increasingly concerned about customer losses, it recently overhauled its offerings with four plans that come with unlimited data. The Comcast data caps aren't quite dead yet because customers with caps have to switch to a new plan to get unlimited data.

Comcast told us that customers in Saline "have access to our latest plans with simple and predictable all-in pricing that includes unlimited data, Wi-Fi equipment, a line of Xfinity Mobile, and the option for a one or five-year price guarantee."

Original Submission

While Reticulum is often put into the same category as Meshtastic, and although both enable communication over LoRa, the comparison breaks down quickly after that. Reticulum is not a single application, but an entire network stack that can be arbitrarily configured to connect through existing TCP/IP, the anonymizing I2P network, directly through a local WiFi connection, or through LoRa radios. The Reticulum network's LXMF transfer protocol allows arbitrary applications to be built on top of it, such as messaging, voice calls, file transfer, and light-weight, text-only browsing. And that's only to name a few applications which have already been developed—the possibilities are endless.

[...] On a more somber note, let's face it: we live in an uncertain world. With the frequency of environmental disasters, political polarization, and infrastructure attacks increasing, the stability of networks we have traditionally relied upon is far from assured.

Yet even with the world as it is, developers are creating new communications networks that have the potential to help in unexpected situations we might find ourselves in. Not only are these technologies built to be useful and resilient, they are also empowering individuals by circumventing censorship and platform control— allowing a way for people to empower each other through sharing resources.

In that way, it can be seen as a technological inheritor of the hopefulness and experimentation—and yes, fun!—that was so present in the early internet. These technologies offer a promising path forward for building our way out of tech dystopia.

Original Submission

Fragile fruits like strawberries and grapes pose a huge challenge. Tortuga, an agriculture tech startup in Denver, developed a robot to do the job. Tortuga was acquired in March by vertical farming company Oishii. The robot resembles NASA's Mars Rover with fat tires and extended arms. It rolls along a bed of strawberries or grapes and uses a long pincher arm to reach into the vine and snip off a single berry or a bunch of grapes, placing them gingerly into a basket.

[...] A crop is only as healthy as its soil. Traditionally, farmers send topsoil samples to a lab to have them analyzed. New technology that uses sensors to scan the soil on-site is enabling a precise diagnosis covering large areas of farms rather than spot checks.

The diagnosis includes microbial analysis as well as identifying areas of soil compaction, when the soil becomes dense, hindering water infiltration, root penetration and gas exchange. Knowing this can help a farmer plan where to till and make other decisions about the new season.

New technology is also changing livestock management. The creation of virtual fences, which are beginning to be adopted in the U.S., Europe and Australia, has the potential to help ranchers save money on expensive fencing and help them better manage their herds.

Livestock are given GPS-enabled collars, and virtual boundaries are drawn on a digital map. If an animal approaches the virtual boundary, it first gets an auditory warning. If it continues, it gets zapped with a mild but firm electric shock.

Is this what Bill Gates is doing with all the farmland he owns?

Original Submission

Their theory suggests that the wheel evolved from simple rollers, which took the form of a series of untethered cylinders, poles, or tree trunks. These rollers were arranged side-by-side in a row on the ground, and the workers would transport their cargo on top of the rollers to avoid the friction caused by dragging. "Over time, the shape of these rollers evolved such that the central portion of the cylinder grew progressively narrower, eventually leaving only a slender axle capped on either end by round discs, which we now refer to as wheels," James explained.

The researchers derived a series of mathematical equations that describe the physics of the rollers. They then created a computer algorithm that simulates the progression from roller to wheel-and-axle by repeatedly solving these equations.

"Our investigation also indicates that environmental conditions played a key role in this evolutionary process," he said. "Previous studies have shown that rollers are only effective under very specific circumstances. They require flat, firm, and level terrain, as well as a straight path. Neolithic mines, with their human-made tunnels and covered terrain would have offered an environment highly conducive to roller-based transport."

Journal Reference:Alacoque, L. R., Bulliet, R. W., & James, K. A. (2024). Reconstructing the invention of the wheel using computational structural analysis and Design. Royal Society Open Science, 11(10). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.240373

Original Submission