Tor Browser 12.0
blog.torproject.org
blog.torproject.org
Also the legal structure to do that was tricky, because you want to avoid the police searching your house; you'd also like tl spread responsability on multiple shoulders. So you have to create a kind of non-profit organization and run the exit node through that.
It's very hard work and we should be thankful for the people who do it.
Does anybody know more about how exit nodes are being run?
I too have some stories, but no one ever met up with me in the flesh.
My first interaction with Tor I purchased some weed on Silk Road. All very much illegally then and less so now. Things change and are not always quite right to begin with. I’d wager that many readers here now have legal retail access to euphoria inducing cannabis products that they did not at the time of that transaction on SR.
Also. I understand that Tor isn’t always secure and I may have messed up. But whatever. Even as some obfuscation I’m ok with it. Anyone interested could track the payment and find me.
You either have haven't thought about this topic very long, or you're just a troll.
Because it's only instantly obvious until you consider it for a moment. By your logic, literally any privacy-preserving technology, be it disposable email services or *69 on your telephone, are morally unjustifiable.
>eh, it's still worth it
Yes it's totally worth it.
They have a good list of points on the Tor site. The most important ones are usually to distance yourself from the exit node and make it obvious what it does so you don't get entangled into whatever is going through the node.
very few people have legitimate uses for an exit node. And it is a security nigthmare for everyone (you owning their crimes, them being at your MiTM attacks mercy, etc)
But Do Run A Tor Node!
everyone should join tor and it should become the main net, with only tor traffic.
Running an exit node is a bit like operating a no questions asked gun shop in downtown (some deprived city).
Sure, there’s perfectly legitimate reasons to own and therefore sell a gun to someone, but that particular shop will be in the business of facilitating crime - and that’s a bad thing and therefore not a moral occupation.
It's not quite like that. For some use cases that could be a correct metaphore. But for others, it's more like running a self-defense class in a well respected neighborhood.
Just a word of caution, while running a non-exit node is obviously safer from a legal point of view, the entire list of active tor nodes isn’t secret, and there are enough people in the world that do not understand how tor works that the chance is non-zero that you’ll still end up on a block list somewhere for simply being a “tor node”, even though you never let any of the tor traffic out on the Internet.
I know for a fact this can happen because it happened to me.
No contact with the police till now.
If you would like to support the Tor network but don't want to run nodes yourself you can donate to one of the relay associations https://community.torproject.org/relay/community-resources/r...
I was too much of a coward to take the risk of the police breaking down my door because of something done by some random person using the free wifi. Thanks to others like you who were braver than I was, a bunch of folks had free Internet access.
There was a captive portal page (another hacky script running as a CGI) where the user had to agree to, "not be a dick" to continue. And, the user also had to agree that they were aware that others, who were dicks, could be accessing their data if it was not encrypted and gave the example of http vs. https in the address bar of the browser.
There was also a picture of an onion on the captive portal page, and a link to a FAQ which talked about open wifi and Tor. Exit nodes were not geo restricted, so if nothing else, the warnings and explanations allowed the users to understand why sites often seemed to think they were in a different country.
There is a limit to what people are able to digest about a subject that is not one they focus on. But, the warnings (right on the main captive portal page; without having to navigate to the FAQ) were sufficiently scary to encourage caution.
The most likely available alternative would have been public access terminals in the library, or other open wifi for those with portable devices. Public access terminals could be running keyloggers and worse. Even if the public terminal is free of malware, the non-technical user might just close a logged in browser tab/window, not realizing that is not sufficient to log them out.
Yes, even with users being careful about looking for https in the URL bar, some websites are broken and use https for their login page, but use http for their session cookies. But, trying to protect from these incompetent websites would require shutting down all public wifi everywhere (OWE [opportunistic wifi encryption without authentication] did not exist yet).
I think my open wifi (and open wifi generally, as well as Tor) were/are a net good. If, after this additional detail you still disagree, then we will just have to disagree.
> "For those of you interested in running an exit node, just be safe. Always remember to run it via your company's VPN to ensure the safety of those making passage through."
The engagement was nuts and the sheer amount of people who use ToR but were unfamiliar with what a statement actually says was frightening.
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/community/team/-/wikis/Exp...
I do regularly handle abuse complaints by blocking IPs or other actions.
The thing is that I rotate my tor nodes every other month, manually. No pipeline setup for this yet. So I destroy old VPS and create new ones with the same signing key and family in the node info.
I suspect you're talking about running an exit node at home, or on an IP-address that matters. That's a stupid thing to do.
See the sources cited at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)#Exit_node_eavesd...
Supposing they own now enough Tor node, which the Wikipedia link is unclear about
Idk if there is a technical solution to this attack problem.
On a technical level, exit node operators aren't supposed to be able to trace the origin of data flowing through them... so this indicates a failure of protocol.
Exit nodes are a mistake. The web is a lost cause by now. Most sites already consider access through Tor to be abuse. Exit nodes are also the focus of the deanonymization attacks that I've seen. The Tor hidden service network should be strengthened instead. We should launch hidden services instead of web sites.
EDIT: Yup; dead on arrival.
I'm sure you could email @dang and ask to be un-shadow-banned, and he would do so.
Just use webmail in your tor browser. And don't send it from your main gmail, but create a throwaway.
Also, HN deletes your account when you them send a mail as stated in the FAQ. It always sucks to delete accounts with user comments, as it destroys context in old threads.
As spiders crawl the web humans should consider anything they post online as undeletable. If you send HN the beforementioned, there is a chance that I can still browse your posts via archive.org or google cache.
If you're afraid of doxxing, maybe make a second thought before hitting "reply".
There's "showdead" profile setting that allows you to see flagged comments, and enough "karma" allows you to vouch for hidden-by-default content.
It's one of those hidden (somewhat) features: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented#flaggi...
If by "HN" you mean the site technology and administrative policy, this is quite untrue.
I always connect by Tor (simply because I connect to everything by Tor) and never experience any problems with;
torsocks www https://news.ycombinator.com
I hope that like Facebook, NY Times and the BBC, we may one day see a Hacker News hidden service onion address.
That said there does seem to be a negative attitude toward Tor from certain Cloud companies that Flares up here from time to time. They seem unable to reconcile individual desires for personal privacy technologies with their business model of defending free speech from DDOS attacks. It's a complex problem but I do wish they'd try harder yo get on-board with the programme in a world where threats to clients are at least as serious as those facing service providers.
Also, Wikipedia blanket-bans Tor because it make trivial to avoid bans and blocks.
Citations please?
Otherwise this is horseshit. Many of HN's users signed up and access HN from tor.
I /often/ utilize the tor browser to access HN. I've not had a single issue /ever/ with that.
It's also a violation of the spirit of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee wrote about this in the December 2010 issue of Scientific American that any walled off website that blocks you from accessing it is unacceptable because it's not the web anymore.
Read-only access works pretty well in most cases (unless it is behind Cloudflare, then you're @#$%@#^%).
Try again, this hasn't been the case for a long time.
And any website using Cloudflare.
It is a personal point of pride that LokiList allows posting over Tor. Not many clearnet sites do, especially without registration.
This seems to me a reasonable design that balances the competing concerns. I like that both of these comments turned into examples of the system working properly. It's true that they had to wait a little before getting unkilled*, but that's not "very anti-tor" nor "very user-hostile".
(* 20 minutes and 10 minutes, respectively)
I eventually stopped using the proxy here on HN not because of this site but Cloudflare and Google would grief me on so many sites that people submit here which made it hard for me to review them and submitting everything to archive.ph is time consuming. I keep the MitM proxy around in case I need to go to a very hostile website or if I want to leave a funny PTR DNS record in their logs.
Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look.
All well and good if you’re just maintaining a cookie recipe site on the dark web, but it’s rarely ever that, is it?
Could we convert our "observers" into early customers?
If it were directly using tor then I'd have to agree that most people wouldn't use it. Only those that are technical enough to understand what's going on and the security aspects. But they wouldn't be using Brave for the Tor functionality, they'd be using Tor Browser.
Basically, using the TOR network as a VPN.
The TOR browser and Brave do the exact same thing, it's just that the TOR browser is configured to not store anything and to make sure it's fingerprint to other sites is as generic as possible (this is also why TOR warns you about changing window size, it un-generalizes that fingerprint). Both ultimately are conveniences because messing with SOCKS proxy settings is rather unfriendly for most users.
If you use a Linux distro, I'd recommend checking out torsocks[1], it's a shared library + a shell script that lets you "onion-ify" any application pretty easily.
[0]: This also means you can connect basically every mainstream browser to TOR if you know the port the SOCKS proxy is running on.
(Still, it's great they have done that.)
Quite a few people involved in crypto send a bit of TOR noise across the wires using that client to do transactions
This is a good point, though. We need more and more things to use it (legitimately) so that the traffic alone isn't as suspect.
It'll always be a little suspect, I suppose, being only visible to exit nodes or whatever
if you're worried, you could use a popular VPN to connect to Tor - using a VPN is less interesting. also, P2P app developers could consider running non-exit nodes in their clients for popular apps. there shouldn't be legal risks unless you're running an exit node, and this adds more noise to the signal of Tor users.
if a Tor user uses your exit node to email a bomb threat or access child porn, it's your source IP that shows up. the FBI should check your IP against the registry of exit node IPs, but if they don't it's still your door getting kicked in.
Alternatively, You -> ISP -> Tor -> VPN and paying with Monero obtained over Tor without ever having disclosed your ID or any revealing info means:
• Your ISP knows who you are, but not what you're doing (no anonymity, yes privacy). The connection to tor establishes privacy from ISP.
• Your Tor exit node sees you're connecting to a VPN, but does not know who you are, or what you're doing (yes anonymity, yes privacy). The routing of Tor establishes anonymity, but not privacy from the exit node. The connection to the VPN establishes privacy from the exit node.
• Your VPN provider knows a bit about what you're doing, but not who you are (yes anonymity, less privacy)
This offers additional protection if your VPN provider is compromised / lying about logging (you have no way to verify at any given moment, only that they weren't in past incidents that have gone to court, but this is no guarantee they can't be compelled to start logging your connections).
This also offers additional protection if your guard node and exit node are compromised, which is sufficient to deanonymize tor users.
What it does not offer protection against is all ISP's involved selling netflow metadata to a single party who uses timing and packet sizes to correlate traffic across all of these connections, like Team Cymru does with their Pure Signal Recon product (formerly called Augury).
If that scares you, I'd encourage you to look up what company actually owns and operates torproject's website, and how many contracts they have with governments, too.
now, a foreign VPN isn't going to be connected to the xkeyscore dragnet like Comcast would be. I'm sure the NSA's pwned dozens of VPN providers, but beam-splitting all VPN traffic into a colo'd supercomputer isn't going to be stealthy. the best the NSA could do is watch for outbound connections from the VPN to Tor, then match the connection to your ingress using their access inside the VPN's infra. they can't do that in bulk without the VPN company catching on. that's a capability they'll save for going after individuals. just the fact you connected to Tor isn't suspicious enough to be worth risking burning their backdoor, for them.
the point is that connecting to Tor via a VPN keeps you out of the dragnets. and all the VPN provider learns is that you're using them as a gateway into Tor.
As far as I can tell, the US Intelligence community has never explained it's aims/goals for Tor. The fact that Tor not only attracts the type of traffic that US Intelligence would have a lot of interest in monitoring, but also by design then funnels that traffic through a small number of exit nodes, makes it seem self-explanatory. But I wouldn't want to presume anything.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(network)
[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/app?q=%2Bproject%3Athe-tor-fil...
[1] https://www.torproject.org/about/reports/ [2] https://blog.torproject.org/transparency-openness-and-our-20...
> 2,500 pages of correspondence — including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates — between the Tor Project and its main funder, a Central Intelligence Agency spinoff now known as the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US government.
So the documents acquired via FOIA requests are worth reading, and it's worth discussing why the US Intelligence community has such an active interest in propping up Tor.
(finally I can say that and it may in fact actually be true for once! hahaha)
The federal government isn't in my threat model, and "you can't fight city hall".
Having a bunch of Tor site certs in your MacOS keychain has its own issues, so what is really needed is a way for Tor browsers to accept those certs directly without using the OS trust stores. The current practice of authenticating the remote site by PGP signature would remain more or less the same - you just wouldn’t have exit nodes sniffing traffic.
I’m also convinced that the whole reason Google has pushed TLS so hard isn’t some noble quest to protect people’s privacy and freedom of speech - it’s more to keep people from blocking their advertisements, which isn’t nearly so sexy an argument, but it has brought good benefits for a lot of people.
I've been on the side of advocating for it, but the other side isn't making an obviously ridiculous argument. The onion protocol itself negotiates an end-to-end cryptographic session, authenticated by the onion site's public key, between the onion site and the end user. There's not cleartext traffic sent between a Tor exit node and the onion site or anything!
My argument in favor of TLS to onion sites was that, at least as of onion protocol v2, the cryptographic session was not itself TLS, and its security and threat model hadn't been as extensively reviewed as those of TLS. So it might turn out that there was something suboptimal there that the rendezvous server could then use to perform a sophisticated cryptographic attack.
I don't know if this is still true of onion protocol v3 or if the client-to-onion-site session is now also based on TLS.
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/torspec/-/blob/main/r...
I think the main question would be: are there cryptographic attacks that a rendezvous server could do that wouldn't work against TLS?
For connections to the clearnet it was always highly recommended to only use TLS and recent Tor browsers have now finally enabled https only mode that displays a big warning if you try to connect to a http server.
Maybe I'm unique, but my dark net activity is usually pretty tame. The number one reason I use Tor is because browsing onion sites reminds a bit more of how the web used to be in the late 1990s. Lot's of garbage of course, but a lot more serendipitous discovery than the web today.
Because of its anonymous nature Onion sites are inherently resistant to being swallowed whole by advertising. Nobody on the dark web is creating "content marketing", if someone is trying to sell you something it's obvious. You're not the product on the dark web.
I know it's wishful thinking, but I often hope for a parallel web to really thrive on Tor.
Nytimes.Com is an example.
Me too. Wish every blog and web site out there was a hidden service instead. Especially this one.
Eg. each client sends out 1000 1 kbyte packets per second to each peer, once per millisecond. Inside each packet, they send the onion encrypted user data. The rest of the packet is filled with rand().
Without that protection, any network attacker can do packet size and timing analysis to unmask nearly any user rather quickly.
If just a single client used this option, their traffic path, all the way to the exit node, would stand out to any network attacker.
CircuitPadding 0|1
If set to 0, Tor will not pad client circuits with additional cover
traffic. Only clients may set this option. This option should be
offered via the UI to mobile users for use where bandwidth may be
expensive. If set to 1, padding will be negotiated as per the
consensus and relay support (unlike ConnectionPadding,
CircuitPadding cannot be force-enabled). (Default: 1)
ReducedCircuitPadding 0|1
If set to 1, Tor will only use circuit padding algorithms that have
low overhead. Only clients may set this option. This option should
be offered via the UI to mobile users for use where bandwidth may
be expensive. (Default: 0)Basically - this option doesn't serve it's intended purpose.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/18/5224130/fbi-agents-track...
Why would someone make a legit bomb threat? Isn't the point of the bomb for it to explode?
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
The only solution to this problem that I can see is massive no opt-out adoption until a tipping point is reached.
No, it isn't rare. Plenty of people use Tor for casual browsing without triggering invasive ads and similar. It just works.
I'm curious as to how it stands out. I can imagine a few things, like an ISP seeing traffic to known TOR intermediary nodes, or maybe analyzing packets to look for some sort of handshake?
> Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look.
Sort of. But what would looking do? What does looking mean? The traffic is encrypted, they can look all they like. In the US they'll need more than "they connected to TOR" to get a warrant to search your device.
https://www.propublica.org/article/heres-one-way-to-land-on-...
Some people just want privacy. No need to have an specific "cookie recipe" activity: they would just browse the New York Times, but in full reassurance of anonymity - as they believe is normal.
(And by the way: "«brows[ing] the New York Times»" - as a sequence of actions - is not a neutral activity, but already a profiling one.)
Nowadays it's very easy to build for arm64 - you either go the way with cross compilation or you go the way with full qemu binary emulation which is as simple as it gets because you would build within an arm64 docker image, e.g., docker.io/arm64v8/alpine or docker.io/arm64v8/ubuntu and qemu-static handles the emulation (it will be slower than cross compilation but as long as speed is acceptable you can go this easy way).
This seems like a dumb way to exploit an http downgrade attack. Far better, would be to redirect the user to a fake looking https site and collect the user data there.
As with many such attacks, a password manager can help mitigate or WebAuthN. Though I am not sure how that would play with Tor and the privacy guarantees users are looking for.
https://www.amazon.com/Surveillance-Valley-Military-History-...
Some more Yasha stuff: https://micahflee.com/2014/12/fact-checking-pandos-smears-ag...
There was one point where my anti-fingerprinting tactics did appear to fool Panopticlick, but that apparently didn't last long. Fingerprinting and anti-fingerprinting are a cat and mouse game, and much worse so than just ad-blocking because there's more at stake than just being annoyed by banners. There's also way too many websites doing everything, and I mean everything with JS. Fricking blog sites half the time display nothing more than a motionless loading spinner if you don't have JS turned on. And if you turn JS on well good luck because lots of things want to use <canvas> to render things that don't even strictly need it, and you're really not going to casually enable canvas for certain things? Even the list of fonts is a decent metric for fingerprinting, yet that's rarely taken seriously because even privacy experts seem to believe that every website needs to display its own fonts for "brand identity."
Though I would stay away from Tor anyway, if I were to use it, JS would have to be turned off entirely.
It’s specifically for browsing the web anonymously.
[0] https://github.com/mikeperry-tor/vanguards/blob/master/READM...
[1] https://status.torproject.org/issues/2022-06-09-network-ddos...
It was a good lesson and helped me realize what Tor should really be used for.
As an alternative for the last point, turn the Security Level to "Safest" or however it's worded, then use the included NoScript addon to enable it for just sites that just won't work without JavaScript. You get functional web + JS disabled in most places where you can.
I think in a years time that will change.
There was also a comment from one of the Tor foundation members about how they wish they were able to deplatform kiwi farms from tor but it’s technically not possible.
I would kind of hope Mozilla sees themselves as neutral carriers. Maybe that's not the case. Still better than Google though.
> they wish they were able to deplatform kiwi farms from tor but it’s technically not possible.
Well, then they built it correctly!
It seems to me people like this want technological solutions to problems rooted in culture and economics. I think the best solution is don't stop people from saying bad things, instead teach others to know when not to listen to the bad things. I guess it's a new phase of humanity though...Dunbar's number might not be changing, but who's in a person's circle is now wildly distributed. I'm not sure of a great solution to people believing birds aren't real or that Qanon isn't a pimply teenager on 4chan, but banning morons from Twitter isn't a real solution. Interesting times.
Here is a much more mundane problem: Using Tor (even a VPN) while logging in to most big Silicon Valley firma that make money with your data (LinkedIn, Facebook, Tinder etc.) will result in your profile being suspended REAL FAST with the only way out to upload your gov't ID, i.e. complete deanonimization (perhaps as a kind of punishment).
Any solutions?
Unfortunately, no solutions in sight.