There are plenty of reasons to use Tor. Not only to obfuscate location but to defend against mass surveillance, including that of the state [1]. Remember that Tor was developed originally and funded by the US State Department. Tor makes communications of LBTQ/Anti-authoritarian/journalist individuals safer in a world where the State Department has to put out advisories [2] about traveling while queer, a pride flag sticker is illegal and punishable by death or imprisonment in over 24 countries and journalists are imprisoned for talking to those who speak out.
Tor is an essential tool for all citizens -- Especially those in the US who would be targeted by those who seek infinite, unrestrained power.
Detecting TOR traffic is trivial for state actors who control their local infrastructure. In the PRC, TOR usage is banned and the ban is enforced via packet inspection.
In any nation likely to target residents in the manners you have proposed, using TOR for any appreciable length of time puts a more prominent target on their backs than walking around with a pride flag sewn onto your jacket.
And fingerprinting TOR usage via deep packet inspection is the fancy-pants way of doing it. Many nations like Ethiopia, Kazakstan, China, and Iran also just prevent routing to known TOR exit nodes-- and they're all known.
Meanwhile TOR is like "just use a proxy brah", seemingly completely unaware that proxy usage is also detectable and that giving advice like that to vulnerable persons in unsafe countries is dangerous to those persons.
So then you get to the "Swiss cheese model" of disaster prevention where in order to safely use TOR you have to use it through a VPN that you connect to through a proxy (all of which is STILL detectable) and any mistake along the way due to not being absolutely and completely perfect in the configuration or usage of TOR will put you at risk of automated detection.
edit: you also, as a vulnerable user in an unsafe country who may not have consistent access to the internet or even speak English, must be stringently up-to-date on the software versions (e.g. the Ricochet vulnerability) of every product used in the TOR chain, which seems... unreasonable.
In theory, yes. In practice, the safety that Tor provides is in numbers, and the numbers just don't look good any more. By using Tor, you are entering a fairly small pool that you share with legit criminals and will be blocked and targeted accordingly. A good VPN like Mullvad is the saner option for most people.
> Tor is an essential tool for all citizens -- Especially those in the US who would be targeted by those who seek infinite, unrestrained power.
This is quite euphemistic. Tor exists to provide telecommunications support to US govt-backed political operations in foreign countries.
The individual welfare of people does not factor in. Take for instance the recent murder of an American citizen by $GOODGUYS vs. when another American citizen died under $BADGUYS captivity. Totally different treatment and rhetoric. People don't matter, politics does.
We should not falsely romanticize State Department programs at the expense of human rights.
You could make the same point without kicking up all the drama by saying there are close to zero legitimate reasons for a work computer on a work network to be reaching out to Tor.
I’d 100% understand if they want to block it… but for a while I ran my home server as a Tor hidden service just to get free dynamic DNS and NAT traversal, and could SSH into it from my office by accessing Tor from there. That’s arguably a legitimate use case.
IG (Irc-Galleria, not Instagram) was huge in Finland for my age group (late 80s-early 90s) - definitely was an early showcase of just how powerful social media could be.
I wonder if theres a similar local phenomenom going on somewhere right now which will become a global megatrend.
the modern consumer in a nutshell: you can effectively ban them from your platform and they will still weasel their way back through the tiniest crack in the system. That chinese counterfeit junk amazon sells is just too lucrative
What else can they do? Check out from life? Or bankrupt themselves on principle?
Honestly, fuck on-line platforms and their arbitrary bans. In meatspace, you can't be just banned from a store, or a store chain, not without a criminal record at least. Sure, user accounts are governed by vendors' ToS, and any store can ban you from their loyalty card program for any reason, but off-line, those are all incidentals not required for completing a purchase. On-line, identity, security, and optional marketing crap got bundled together into a single "account". It's a historical accident that needs to get corrected, possibly by regulatory means, to harmonize it with the general expectation that the store can't refuse you service for extra-legal reasons.
I'd get this sentiment if it was some super critical piece of living a fulfilling life, but amazon is a junk store which makes the whole situation absurd to begin with
There are only so many places you can order stuff on-line locally, to save on non-food products more expensive or downright unavailable locally. Interfacing with individual vendor and their bespoke system for each purchase gets cognitively exhausting quickly - a major reason why people prefer those large marketplaces. And then, it's not just Amazon. Adopting such policies is becoming a trend parallel to centralization. Amazon alone may not be "super critical piece of living a fulfilling life", but getting banned by it and a few more large companies (Google, in particular), and you may lose some critical things (at least critical in immediate term).
A single one, no. Two dozen different ones - I can do it, but it gets so annoying that I'll happily pay premium to buy the same things on a single site.
I don’t get why you get downvoted on this comment. Anyone buying from Amazon should realize they are buying from Temu in a trenchcoat, filling the pockets of an immoral man who treats his warehouse workers like chattel.
I have bought from amazon exactly once in four years now, because a vendor (a chinese one!) has Amazon as the only outlet where they provide warranty because they are plagued with counterfeits and bootleggers.
I find that fact for a chinese reseller so incredibly ironic. These guys are good people tho, bunch of gamers making the pinnacle of controllers for pc gaming with mouse clicker buttons and whatnot.
Shoutout to Playdigi Apex :D (no affiliation / economic insentive)
Nobody cares about eating healthy either, but being lean with a six pack. That said, many still try to eat healthy. I dont understand the point of this article
Heres the actual study, but neither yogurt or oats are mentioned as part of the food groups studied, other than a fleeting mention of fruit yogurt being excluded as a source of fruit
We should stop linking low quality bait like Guardian articles on this website
Agreed, though any study should link to the paper published by said study. It's not just the Guardian. The media outlets are all equally and dangerously poor at science journalism and presenting findings in an appropriate way, and should be banned from doing so due unless we can find a way to stop incentivising sensationalism.
This is just downright dangerous too. Imagine a parent seeing this and now depriving their kids from valuable nutrition sources like yoghurt and oats because "the paper said theyre harmful"
This is exactly the thing I am most fearful of. I grew up in the 80's & 90's (US) so I can only speak to that time period, but my mom was especially prone to treating the evening news as a science authority. Their delivery of sensationalized studies had my childhood diet changing by the week and I was not the only kid in school experiencing this.
What readers of media outlets fail to remember is that your outlet of choice has worked to earn your trust for a reason. The reporter may even have the best of intentions in delivering news that makes us question bananas or yogurt, but in not recognizing the risks of their presumed authority, they are being grossly negligent and irresponsible with information.
It is a problem. We want to be informed, but who do you trust? Even scientific papers are prone to non-scientific influence, the studies themselves sometimes incentivized toward certain outcomes to please the sources of their grant money, or whatever. If we are just supposed to take every bit of info we consume with a grain of salt, the persistent low-grade stress and anxiety that comes with that is equally as damning as just throwing your hat into one particular media outlet's ring and saying "fine, whatever, I trust these guys."
This is the stuff that keeps me up at night, if I'm being honest.
I was inclined to disagree with you initially since groupthink is the default corporate mode, and I don't see free thinkers doing well in these environments - but then reflected on my own stance on MS and the reason I don't absolutely shun them is because of childhood nostalgia.
Maybe you're on to something. I just wish they'd replace it with Linux.
They're literally plotting policies of "wealth redistribution" in the EU at least. The idiot bureaucrats can call it what they want, but forcibly redistributing your assets more and more to other people makes it thievery.
The longer people will call it communist plot and insist on not paying taxes, the higher is the probability of having the actual communist plot and being exiled to the Moon by a popular vote.
Maybe if we don't strip poor people of any chance of getting out of poverty they won't turn to communism.
If you chase an animal in the corner, it will fight back. You can shoot it and win but don't be surprised if the situation repeats.
The problem is that communism (as it is practiced) forces everyone into poverty, except for the tiny fraction of the population who comprise the elite of the politburo.
Yes, communism is horrible, I totally agree. What I am alluding to is that some form of social democracy can bring long term stability, thus minimizing the risk of people radicalizing.
Revealed preference at play again, and everyone knows that whats the whole communist thing really is about anyway - crippling jealousy and wishing to kill off the people who've put more effort in their life than you.
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