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Comment by hyproxia | Hacker News Reader

VPNs/Proxies do this job just fine though, without the additional latency/bandwidth penalty of Tor.

Good luck finding any VPNs/Proxies that isn't also used by criminals, which was the initial point you made. Tor is also different because it's a open source project, driven by their own non-profit foundation and doesn't costs any money to use. Also hard to find any VPNs/proxies that offer those things.

The difference is that criminals that use VPNs/Proxies can be easily caught, unlike Tor users.

You're talking over each other. It's plain to see. The conversation you're having rests upon the answer to the questions: "What percentage of Tor usage is malicious compared to VPN, electricity, crowbar usage, etc.? And what percentage is morally acceptable?". Just pointing out that Tor is used by some good people and some bad people some of the time is useless on its own.

Personally, I have a suspicion, that despite my love of freedom, Tor usage is probably primarily paranoid people and drugs, and a small percentage facilities anonymous exploitation of children in a way that no other technology can. I would love to be proved wrong and see some facts that Tor is actually a net good for the world.

Also one thing I've noticed is that the majority of good use cases for Tor you can achieve with just the Tor browser, whereas the majority of bad use cases you need Tor hidden services. E.g. as a journalist you can still use Tor browser to talk to your sources anonymously. But try hosting a drugs website or child porn on the clear net: you need Tor hidden services for that. Basically you'd only really use hidden services if you want to host content that is banned in every country, e.g. pedophilia or drug network. Whereas if you're a freedom fighter, why not use Tor to connect to a Wordpress website hosted in a country that's sympathetic to your cause? I just don't see a use case for hidden services. Yes, it is less trust in a central provider, but at what cost? You can also just move hosting countries. "At what cost" goes back to the first two questions and it would be interesting to know how we all feel about it.

Thank you Moodles, for writing a reasonable comment amidst a torrent of unreasonable ones.

On the other hand, buying drugs on Tor is way safer than buying drugs in the street.

Sure, but this is moving the goalposts. First it was: "It's used for good things, not evil things!". And now it's "actually, who cares, this is a good thing anyway". Now we're arguing over the pros and cons of freely available drugs, including ones such as fentanyl. I often find debates around Tor (and other things too) are like this: you discover half the people you're arguing with are ideologically driven. Are we arguing about the fundamental facts of how Tor is used, or the fundamental morals we should have?

Is it really moving the goalposts? Tor being used to buy drugs came into the discussion because of the moral implications of developing a tool that can be used for bad things. There are two things in that discussion: what are the usage statistics of Tor (for example: 20% drugs, 10% child pornography, 50% oppressed people, 20% "noise". This is a pure invention and I have no idea if this reflects or not the actual usage of Tor), and are those things morally good or bad.

The discussion turned around "Tor is used a lot to buy drugs, which is bad". At least that's how I interpreted this part of your comment:

> Personally, I have a suspicion, that despite my love of freedom, Tor usage is probably primarily paranoid people and drugs, and a small percentage facilities anonymous exploitation of children in a way that no other technology can. I would love to be proved wrong and see some facts that Tor is actually a net good for the world.

You didn't directly said that buying drugs on Tor is bad, that's my assumption, but I think that it's a fair assumption considering what you wrote. So my point was a refutation that Tor being used to buy drugs is necessarly a bad thing.

> Are we arguing about the fundamental facts of how Tor is used, or the fundamental morals we should have?

I think both are important if you want to determine whether Tor is a net plus or minus. I don't have any statistics to contribute and don't want to pretend that I have any. I think that if you take a point of view close to "drugs users will buy drugs anyway" and "drugs users shouldn't be exposed to more dangers just because they want to buy drugs", drugs on Tor can be seen as a positive. Of course you're free to disagree on those two views.

My personal view is that I like some drugs (weed, DMT, mushrooms) and will ebulliently buy them and encourage most others to as well, but I’m skeptical that allowing random people to sell heroin, fentanyl and meth is a good idea. But I don’t know if dark net markets are good or evil given the state many addicts find themselves in. Perhaps in my above posts I was conflating “bad” with “criminal” though.

The reason I said it was moving the goalposts is because the initial arguments implicitly assumed drug markets were bad and only listed reasons “Union workers , journalists, security researchers, IT managers, lawyers, and judges and prosecutors” (really curious how some of those really need Tor by the way), but I appreciate you’re a different person so I shouldn’t have said that. The pros and cons of drug markets is a difficult debate. Regardless, I do think a lot of support (and criticism) for Tor is ideologically driven and no amount of statistics about drugs or child porn will change some people’s minds because they simply ideologically like (or hate) the concept at a fundamental level. I suppose it’s the same for all political issues?

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