

Hidden Services, Current Events, and Freedom Hosting - mike-cardwell
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-events-and-freedom-hosting

======
teeja
This WSJ article from 12/12 explains in some detail where TOR came from and
what it was supposedly developed for.

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732467720457818...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324677204578185382377144280.html)

"Created in part to hide the online activity of dissidents in countries such
as Iran and China that censor the Internet ... [Tor] gets about 80% of its $2
million annual budget from branches of the U.S. government ... [It] began in
1996 as a project of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory called Onion Routing
..."

~~~
zellers
All of these US "freedom" projects are about undermining governments that are
not conducive to American interests and their ability to control rogue
elements which would destabilize the State.

It's now evident that managed democracy with a massive surveillance state is
what's behind the veil of global freedom and liberty. The most you can expect
from the US government is to leave you alone, and they will only do that as
long as you're not interfering with their economic or social interests.

~~~
teeja
That's certainly one reasonable way to interpret what's going on.

------
yk
So, is there actually somewhere some news? All I have seen ( I did not check
too carefully) that some people claim that the script includes some 0days, but
without any detail that would convince me that it is not trolling by 12 year
olds... (Obviously the Tor guys say something more reasonable, but actually
they also just say that they are watching the news.)

------
D9u
In light of the Freedom Hosting kerfluffle, as well as the Snowden
revelations, I don't see much incentive to run an exit node.

Prior to these recent events I fooled around with setting up hidden services
for my own educational purposes, but the fact that someone could use my Tor
exit node to access illegal content was enough to preclude my setting up an
exit on any of my servers.

Then I read about some guy in Austria who was arrested for running a Tor exit
node and my decision was justified.

The problems inherent to running any sort of anonymizing service are just too
many, and too serious, as we have recently seen.

~~~
hamkt
>In light of the Freedom Hosting kerfluffle, as well as the Snowden
revelations, I don't see much incentive to run an exit node.

I don't see how this has anything at all to do with snowden, and as achille
points out this story is about a host of the some of the most infamous Tor
Hidden Services, it has nothing to do with exit nodes.

Running an Exit Node is a somewhat risky activity since your ip address will
be seen when a Tor user hacks/views CP/Torrents.

Running a hidden service allows one to _anonymously_ host a website, so it
will require significant effort to unmask you, and is usually alot safer than
running an exit node.

>The problems inherent to running any sort of anonymizing service are just too
many, and too serious, as we have recently seen.

There are actually two completely safe ways to contribute to the Tor network:

Running a (non-exit) relay routes traffic internally through the Tor Network
and is therefore a risk-free activity that can be bandwidth intensive.

Running a bridge allows is a risk-free activity that requires much less
bandwidth.

Even exit nodes aren't as dangerous to run as you may think, according to
[https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html](https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html)
there are about 2000 exit nodes and you have only brought up one case of a
prosecution resulting from the operation of one.

