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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

Twitter's statement is consistent with your experience, given the empirical reality that Tor IPs generally "exhibit spam-like behavior" way more often than the average Internet user's IP. Note that Twitter's statement says nothing about anonymity as an end-to-end goal, only the technical ability to use Tor. And, as always, you can buy a burner phone.

What would a good solution for this be? Any anonymous proxy would quickly be used by people who want to spam Twitter. (So, among other things, this means that Twitter running a hidden service isn't directly useful.) Could a proof-of-work or rate-limiting system allow building a proxy that couldn't be practically used by spammers?

How does Facebook deal with this problem?

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How about something like https://vpn.ht/en?

If you really value privacy, you should be willing to pay modestly for it, no?

VPNs don't give you anonymity, the company behind it knows everything about your connection. And paying just helps connect your account with your identity.

HTTPS://proxpn.com accepts Bitcoin and does no server side logging.

And how can I be sure that a VPN service I have never heard about before actually does not log my data on the server side?

Besides r3bl's point, if the FBI had demanded a copy of the SSL/TLS key from them, as they did with Lavabit, their claim "we don't log" would still be true.

They also require a mobile number for account activation.

Well,nothing ever gives full online anonymity. Only raises the cost to get to you.

One designs her own anonymity according to one's relevant threat model. For practical reasons, one can reasonably aim at evading global surveillance by not standing among the low hanging fruits, but aiming at staying out of reach of a state sponsored probe is an altogether different matter, think edward snowden different.

Then again some VPN providers exist where they can legally operate without collecting and retaining data about their clients. In any case, be sure to check your VPN provider for the level of anonymity it provides[1].

[1]: https://torrentfreak.com/anonymous-vpn-service-provider-revi...

My point is that we have no means of ensuring that those VPN providers actually provide any anonymity; for all I know, all of those who claim they don't log could actually be logging and selling all that data, making their use worse for my privacy than directly connecting to the Internet.

It comes down to the point made by cperciva in his post "Playing chicken with cat.jpg": http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...

OK, and what distinguishes this VPN service from complete snake oil, or worse, something that actively tracks you? Remember that a VPN is by definition a MITM: all your traffic in both directions goes through it.

cryptostorm[1] is by far the best on this aspect, along with how billing is handled separately (from a different organization based on Sovereign First Nation Territory!) from your connection details (which they don't log).

1. https://cryptostorm.is/

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