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[–] 10 points 8 months ago (23 children)

Is TOR not completely owned by the feds? I remember even back in the silk road days people were saying the FBI owns every endpoint. Is TOR still practical? I truly don't know I'm asking for input.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    If enough people set endpoints, then the feds will own a fewer proportion of the total. AKA: we have to be the change we want to see in the world.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah but even if you could get it down to like 50% why would anyone want to take that risk? Idk I might be misunderstanding something about how TOR works but it seems no more anonymous than the clearweb from what I've heard.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (2 children)

    TOR is not to be trusted. Everyone else has been working on strengthening their security while TOR has been caught numerous times weakening theirs.

    Use i2P and sneakernet. Fuck tor.

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  • [–] 1 point 7 months ago (1 child)

    Oh i2P is definitively a better option where you can have it. However, Tor is somewhat more approachable as of current: we have for example Tor Browser for the masses, whereas I at least haven't heard of any sort of "I2P Browser" at least for Firefox. Of the three options, Tor is the only one I know that is "portable" (you don't need to be able to make admin-level network changes to use it).

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago* (7 children)

    In this scenario it wouldn't matter because the idea is to use it as a way to access a website that would otherwise be accessed over clearnet but has become inaccessible. But if they made an onion site endpoints wouldn't be used anyway afaik since the traffic doesn't leave the network. Now that I'm thinking about it there might be some issues with practicality doing it this way if they have a big volume of traffic, but there are options for routing around censorship that don't involve DNS.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (6 children)

    I don't understand this comment, can you elaborate? Why wouldn't the endpoints be used? This is probably my ignorance but I thought all traffic was routed through the onion network and then eventually to the end device, but all that extra routing can't help you if the Feds control the last stop before whatever server you're trying to contact.. are you saying that if a site is entirely hosted on TOR then no information makes it to an endpoint?

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (5 children)

    are you saying that if a site is entirely hosted on TOR then no information makes it to an endpoint?

    Basically yeah. My understanding is that exit nodes are special and using them is a vulnerability, but you only use exit nodes to access clearnet sites from Tor, and you are less vulnerable if you aren't doing that and rather going to sites with .onion urls. Which, unfortunately I can't find one for this website, but I'm thinking they'd probably consider making one if they can't maintain any clearnet domains anymore.

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  • [–] -1 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    I don't think that's true and a very cursory google suggests (to me at least) that im right and I don't have time to parse a bunch of sources right now. So idk if anyone else could chime in with specific technical details or a source id appreciate it.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    https://onionservices.torproject.org/technology/properties/

    Usually, whenever a Tor user is surfing around, their connection exits the Tor network at some point to reach a destination on the internet.

    But with Onion Services, the communication from one point to another happens entirely inside the Tor network, all the time.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I guess I was holding onto some fearmongering from the silk road days when i swear everyone was saying not to use TOR because it was all owned. It's good to know that onion addresses can be accessed without revealing any info. If you accidentally navigate from a Tor site to a clearweb site how much is potentially given away, assuming the exit node is compromised?

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    I wouldn't go as far as claiming it doesn't reveal any info, all I'm saying here is that there are more security guarantees, and demonstrated security failures of Tor related to adversarial exit nodes don't necessarily apply to onion services. I don't really know much beyond that.

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  • [+] 1 point 8 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    I mean the same reason we don't have the full Epstein files for one? They just don't care until they have to. But also just because they aren't prosecuting shit right now doesn't mean they aren't collecting all that data to feed into their latest shitty chatbotm

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  • [+] 1 point 8 months ago (5 children)
  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Talking about the propensity of the current (US mostly but other places too) administration to just hoard data and rely on shitty 'AI' tools to compile and sort through it/analyze it. Idk apparently I was misinformed about the extent to which TOR is actually compromised though. Edit: the m was a typo its supposed to say chatbot if you didn't get that.

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  • [+] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    I don't know what you're asking. They do it for the same reason Apple or Google or whoever steals all your data and hoards it. Because knowledge is power and on the internet data has become synonymous with knowledge so they think they're gaining an upper hand. Think about it, Facebook had a facial recognition thing like 10 whole fucking years ago that would scan your photos and guess who was in your pictures. The US government definitely has more sophisticated tools than that and all the storage space they'd need. LLMs have just given them the ability to process all that data they've collected on everyone.

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