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Comment by sillysaurus3 | Hacker News Reader

This is correct. It's important to remember that everyone is just very, very bad at opsec. The ones who aren't usually don't comment.

It's very hard and you spend most nights worrying the police will kick your door in. Not too worthwhile.

Those who are serious should learn from the Whonix wiki. It's hard to find a more stellar source of unbiased and comprehensive information. They have pros and cons of both VPN to Tor and Tor to VPN, but that's like 2% of the overall concerns you have to worry about.

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I experimented with the Whonix setup while I was running a Qubes workstation and I was extremely impressed with the architecture. I also read through their wiki and was quite impressed at thorough explanations of the TOR network and opsec in general. I've also read through the actual TOR docs but most of it didn't stick. I see it as more of a reference.

The only reason I ever left Qubes was because Xen still has not implemented a workaround for GPU passthrough with consumer NVIDIA cards like KVM does. I need this for gaming. I now run a KVM system with separate VMs for each domain similarly to Qubes, but the moment GPU passthrough functionality is addressed by Xen I'm moving back.

The KVM experience is quite subpar, for example it is lacking a secure copy-paste between domains and forces me to type out my passwords from my password manager VM when I need them.

How is adding additional layers of security bad when there is a specific attack against one of the layers of security (timing attack via controlled TOR nodes) that a VPN-to-Tor would disrupt? If this method is dependent on knowing the latency going in and out of the network, adding VPNs that have varying latencies would seem to defeat this on the surface.

I'm posing the question, as I don't see an answer in the article. Nobody gets better at opsec if flawed methodologies aren't picked apart in detail. I'm surprised I was downvoted, but I don't comment here frequently and maybe didn't pose the question in enough detail. This is usually how I was accessing Tor based on the assumption that most of the exit nodes are compromised.

Again: Go read. I gave you a reliable reference. I'd recommend spending all weekend reading the wiki and thinking carefully about the issues. Even if you don't use the information directly, it will give you some wonderful insights into the belly of the underworld.

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