China Cracks Down on Tor Anonymity Network | Hacker News Reader

China Cracks Down on Tor Anonymity Network

technologyreview.com

33 pointspmikal13 comments

I would be extremely cautious about connecting to these interim hosts that provide access to the rest of the Tor network.

If I were a government bent on surveillance, the first thing I would do after blacklisting legitimate hosts would be to publicize my own malicious connection points. Here, little bee, have some honey.

I don't want to be a bee near your back yard, or a Tor user in any country you potentially run.

Honeypots attract bears, not bees. Bees make the honey.

http://images.google.com/images?q=honeypot+bear

I might very well be wrong about that, my knowledge of English idioms can be lacking at times.

However, in my experience bees are attracted to sugary material like honey even though they themselves make it. And a Google image search returns many results as well: http://images.google.com/images?q=honeypot+bee

Not to skew your point because indeed bees are attracted to honey but that image search has less meaning as many honeypots have bees on them while traditionaly bears are shown as being attracted to honey and therefore honeypots.

Tor is about concealing endpoints, not data. The Tor network is very explicitly and very visibly untrusted. If your data is encrypted, a node can forward your stuff or not. That's it.

Of course, this doesn't help you when the police knocks down your door because you merely connected, even though Tor encourages you to run your machine as a proxy itself to get deniability -- and I even recall hearing about a Tor "virus" that provides deniability of even running the program. All very well if you're in a country with rule of law, not so much if the local party-officer says you're going down for Googling Tianamen Square.

If you're promoting very risky material through tor you might want to be this cautious, but the 60th year anniversary (which is why tor was blocked in the first place) has already passed. For the near future, I would expect the government to decrease its surveillance and filtering efforts, not increase them.

The same government might even write an encryption program and then claim it is open source and somewhat undetectable and call it RealCrypt or HonestCrypt or TrueCrypt and dupe everyone into using it. Please name one developer behind this Super, Real, Free, Genuine, Awesome encryption software that everyone is using now. Save yourself the trouble; you can't name one because the developers of RealCrypt are anonymous.

Why does it matter who the developers are? The source is available. Build it and compare it with the binaries.

http://www.truecrypt.org/downloads2

Hmm... I've used Tor in the past when working from China. This could sort of suck. It was dog slow but sometimes the only way to gain access.

FYI I used it to access sites that were blocked by the great firewall for no conceivable reason (like pbworks.com and my own personal dev server).

I surprised that Chinese hackers don't try to find some way to DDOS their own government. It'll probably be like a proletariat revolt. You can only mess with people's internet so long before they'll start striking back.

I think its interesting how TOR is trying to work on realtime bridge connections with IP address distributed through Twitter. Yet another great realtime application for Twitter.

The GFW is implemented on the backbone Internet of China, you are suggesting taking down the whole country's network.

Also there are thousands 'cyberpolice' for each province and city lurking on public Internet every hour looking for possible crimes, it's hard to organize an effective attack.

Sometimes I wonder if at some point there are diminishing returns in the prospect of censorship. Even if the chinese government puts vast amounts of resources behind censoring the 10-15 thousand users of the Tor network, they have a much larger population to worry about and those users are often technically competent enough to circumvent the attempts at censorship by the chinese government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com