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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

It's somewhat informative to compare Zed's response to personal criticisms vs those he targets with his own criticisms. Follow the chain of twitter replies and make up your own mind.

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So much name calling and playground idiocy. Just looking at a sample of the tweets made my head hurt.

Surely most of us don't use Tor because

  1. It's slow as hell
  2. We're not doing anything illegal or trying to get past
     censorship

Well I did try to use Tor to get past censorship(I'm in China) and it's not effective here unless you already know someone outside the Chinese network to connect to (that is not a public ip).

They (Tor) are losing their fight. IMO

Suppose the FreedomBox catches on, and there's a Tor node on half of them. That could represents millions of Tor exit nodes within 5 years.

That should turn the tide, don't you think?

If we're playing the suppose game, what if the chinese government collapses? That'd turn the tide too, and there's probably a better chance of that happening then there ever being millions of tor exits.

I'm playing the guessing game because I believe the FreedomBox will happen (more than 0.9 probability within 5 years). We have the hardware and most of the software. The final set-up should take a year or so, then we just have to sell that. And selling will be easy. Who wouldn't want a bit of personal cloud at home? We don't even need to overthrow Microsoft, or eradicate Windows. No coercion is required, except with some ISPs.

The Chinese government collapsing within 5 years? That takes a revolution. I assign less than 0.1 probability to that.

Depends what it collapses into?

I agree with 1.

I think 2. is interesting to talk about, because the intersection of legal activities with what those in power find objectionable is the battlefront of liberty.

So while Tor may not be interesting to joe public yet, I do think it's worth exacting discussion of it's strengths and flaws.

FWIW this includes Zed's criticisms up until the point he took his ball and went home.

Strongly disagree with (2). I use Tor because anonymous communication is essential in a democratic society. This has been known since the Federalist Papers were published anonymously in 1787-1788 [1] and has been constantly reaffirmed by our courts since then. The most oft citied case is McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Comm'n. As Justice Thomas wrote in his concurrence: the Framers shared the belief that [anonymous publishing] was firmly part of the freedom of the press. It is only an innovation of modern times that has permitted the regulation of anonymous speech. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Papers

[2] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZC1.html

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