Do you use Tor everyday? | Hacker News Reader

Do you use Tor everyday?

5 pointsph33r5 comments

torproject.org has a section called 'Who Uses Tor?' and lists: Friends and Family, Businesses, Activists, Media, etc.

None of my IT colleagues use it, my family certainly doesn't use it, and two guys I know who work in the NetSec field don't bother with it. It would seem the stigma is real.

Do you use Tor everyday?

- Browse HN and reddit with it?

- Do regular search queries and browsing on it?

- Use legitimate .onion sites (DuckDuckGo, Facebook, Proton Mail) instead of their clearnet address?

The stigma is real, because Tor is actually extremely slow (at least in India) for everyday use. Even when I want to visit sites that are blocked by Indian ISPs, and which do have an easily found .onion address, I don't bother with it - I'd rather use a free VPN instead, despite the lack of transparency involved - Tor is just too slow.

Unless it (somehow) finds a way to decrease latency in the future, it will remain as it is today - filling a useful niche for the masses, and even a daily driver for the privacy concerned - but I can't see it ever being in the mainstream. The average users couldn't give two hoots about privacy - they just want things to work, which is an understandable PoV.

And why would anyone visit HN with it? FB, I can get behind, but what tangible benefits would you get from using Tor on a site which (afaik) doesn't track you, and doesn't sell your data? Genuinely curious.

I find Tor most useful as a networking tool rather than a security/privacy tool.

The Hidden Service functionality is great for breaking out of Carrier Grade NAT, normal NAT, or any other restricted network environment.

A prime example of this is being able to SSH into devices running on a 4G LTE connection. You're behind CGNAT so the public IP address is not unique to you, and you definitely can't port forward as you're just a customer and not in control of the ISP systems. If you run a Hidden Service, you can break right out - and it's secure too, as long as you use the new Onion v3 spec rather than the original Onion v2.

I agree that Tor seems to have a large stigma though - I find that the terms 'Tor' and 'Onion' usually make people who aren't aware think of the scary criminal underground. The term 'Hidden Service' isn't so bad. The idea that Tor is simply a networking tool seems new to most people.

TOR is something I use only occasionally, when the need is there. Using it regularly would be too frustrating for me as TOR is godawfully slow even on a really fast connection.

Using TOR to access a social media site defeats the purpose of anonymity, once you login facebook knows it's you and they can see your messages so TOR was useless. At that point might as well just go the PGP/GPG route to post your message.

I use to browse the sites that have been blocked, mostly to download tutorials, and books.

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