
Strength in Numbers: An Entire Ecosystem Relies on Tor - DyslexicAtheist
https://blog.torproject.org/strength-numbers-entire-ecosystem-relies-tor
======
seibelj
I personally believe that Tor is compromised. I have been saying this for
several years. The amount of bandwidth it consumes, and the reliance on honest
entrance and exit nodes, means it is assured that three-letter agencies run
the whole network. I’m confident the government can demask users on demand as
needed.

I would love a counterpoint to my opinion but given that public honest nodes
have trivial donations I don’t understand who can afford to support this
network other than incentivized agencies.

~~~
arkadiyt
One possible counterpoint is that the FBI took over and ran a child
pornography onion service in 2015 [1] in order to deliver malware to visitors
and demask them. This suggests that at least the FBI does not have the
capability to demask users on demand.

[1]: [https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-
fbis-u...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkj8vv/the-fbis-
unprecedented-hacking-campaign-targeted-over-a-thousand-computers)

~~~
ng12
Couldn't it have been parallel construction? They wanted convictions without
revealing that Tor has been compromised.

~~~
rictic
There were strong suspicions of parallel construction in the Silk Road case,
where the US government was able to track down the Silk Road's servers despite
its use of TOR. One article: [https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/silk-road-
lawyers-poke-h...](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/10/silk-road-lawyers-poke-
holes-in-fbis-story/)

~~~
EGreg
Read Tarbell’s deposition

[https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-
LsKJJAOvP4fDfuhV/Ulbricht%20...](https://archive.org/stream/pdfy-
LsKJJAOvP4fDfuhV/Ulbricht%20Criminal%20Complaint_djvu.txt)

Or TLDR read some news article from the time

[http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/10/11/crossing-swords-with-
pira...](http://mag.newsweek.com/2013/10/11/crossing-swords-with-pirates-in-
cyberspace.html)

------
mindfulhack
That is a very well-done campaign. Motivated me to donate what I could.

Now more than ever the world needs Tor.

~~~
jen729w
Yep, this has me looking at running a relay now that I have the bandwidth to
do it (thanks, NBN). I don’t use Tor personally—I’m lucky, I don’t need to—but
it’s an invaluable service for those who do.

~~~
devereaux
If you don't have the resources, don't run a relay.

Instead, try to lobby at work to make you site directly available on a onion
address.

Normalizing is more important IMHO.

If you can't do that at work, just install the client on W10, and show it to
friends and family.

Because there is strength in numbers.

~~~
jen729w
I don’t have a ‘work’ [0] but I do have a very stable 100/40 connection at
home that is very rarely pushed to those numbers.

I’ve set it up this morning, I’m running a relay but NOT an exit node, as per
Tor’s recommendation. I’ll keep an eye on it and my network connection.

Further advice welcomed, I just want to do the right thing. Thank you.

[0]: And when I do ‘work’ it tends to be at the sort of place where you
absolutely could never run a Tor relay!

~~~
mindfulhack
All the best. It's uncanny. I moved to a house that had NBN, so I set up a
middle relay for the first time in my life. I had an amazing 150/100
connection from Aussie Broadband.

Then I moved house again, and now I'm back in a non-NBN area. No more Tor
relay from me.

I think running relays is great idea to help speed up the network to improve
user experience. Just note, for middle relays (which is sadly the only sane
option from home unless you're fine with police banging down your door at 4am
at any time due to your IP address publicly sharing all manner of illegal
material), you may not get use for weeks or even months, apparently the
network waits until you prove your track record of consistency first. But it's
important to just be there to support sudden surges in Tor use like when a
dictatorship crackdown happens somewhere, and en entire country suddenly needs
to access normal websites again. So if you can afford the electricity of a
small tower running 24/7 at home to support Tor, I'd recommend it, I've done
it before. try the tor relays IRC chan for support.

~~~
jen729w
Their blog post explains this really well. [0]

I'm running this on an old Mac Mini which sits under my desk, is ethernet
connected to my router, and is never turned off. My only concern is CPU usage,
this thing is a mid-2010 Core 2 Duo. It runs quickly enough because I stuck an
SSD in it, but I've no idea how Tor might affect it once I start seeing actual
traffic.

Also interesting that there are only 78 [1] active relays in Australia as of
the time of writing. That's not many!

[0]: [https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-new-
relay](https://blog.torproject.org/lifecycle-new-relay)

[1]:
[https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:au](https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:au)

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dachshound665
So .. my (mobile) ISP is blocking access to torproject.org. Guess the proof is
in the pudding why TOR is needed

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gammateam
Now do a study on how many productivity hours we have lost solving reCaptcha
over TOR

~~~
executesorder66
Try this Firefox add-on [0]. In my own personal experience it works 95% of the
time.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-
captch...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/buster-captcha-
solver/)

------
ProxCoques
Wow I love Tor. It's a sort of technical poem to my faith in humanity.

