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Comment by user7261 | Hacker News Reader

I would love to use Tor but I don't want to touch anything illegal. Ever. Is it possible?

Is there some index, directory or search engine curated with this in mind?

Edit: I didn't mean to make anyone feel offended and I sorry. I will take more care when asking questions like this in the future. Thank you all for your compression

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It’s funny that people have this impression that Tor = you’ll be immersed in the dark web and illegal things will just appear on your screen.

It’s like any other browser. You open it and type in an address. Your data is just encrypted and obfuscated.

You can use tor also for search, reading articles, and research topics that you don't want associated in any way with your traceable internet persona (no region, ip, etc) identifiers / telemetry.

There are lots of reasons to use tor that have nothing to do with illegal sites.

Anything that you want to really keep private and never creep back into your normal day-to-day browsing experience (considering divorce, medical conditions, future vacation plans, "taboo political ideologies", etc.).

Traveling to a foreign country with questionable privacy laws?

You can access normal search engines, websites, etc. Not just .onion sites. Just avoid logging into your personal accounts.

You can use Tor for all everyday browsing too, with all the personal accounts and a normal version of Firefox. Still prevents your ISP from learning which sites you visit, still prevents the sites you visit from knowing your IP address, still circumvents any local censorship (which btw is probably the biggest use of Tor, thanks to RuTracker :D). And unlike a VPN provider, you don't have to pay $$$ and don't have a central point of potential logging (don't have to rely on "i swear we don't log" policies).

I understand your concern, the answer is that the TOR browser can be used just like your normal browser.

I use it to browse reddit or make posts like these. I like my privacy and like that by using Tor for normal browsing, it makes it just a little bit less suspicious when others who need the privacy for wistleblowing, human rights, etc. purposes are using Tor.

The Tor browser will not show you anything that you do not seek out. If you just browse to the sites that you normally use, and those sites don't have any illegal content, then you're fine.

I will note however that in some countries Tor itself IS illegal, but that would be up to your local laws.

There's nothing illegal about running Tor. Are you worried about accidentally bumping into child porn on it?

Yes, that's it

Do you usually stumble across illegal material when you browse the Internet? I don't see why it would be any different using Tor... you can still access clearweb sites via the Tor Browser.

Not only that, you can access onion sites using an ordinary browser via sites like tor2web. Using the Tor browser doesn't expose you to anything you otherwise weren't, it just makes you more anonymous.

One of the premises of the tor onion routing is traffic is routed thru intermediates. I suppose this question is about validating if being part of the onion router is controllable and secondary (an assumption) being part of the tor mesh means you are carrying traffic that is illegal or morally questionable

Tor browser won't make you a relay.

Indeed, Tor browser comes with its own dedicated tor instance. And I don't think that it can run as a relay. Maybe with some tweaking. Also, it's only running when the browser is.

This isn't BitTorrent, you don't become a part of the network by simply using it. You have to explicitly choose to become a relay.

The fact that you are afraid of a free and open internet is depressing.

I'm sorry, it's was not my intention to depress you.

Actually, the fact is I what to be able to advocate for Tor to friends and family in the future. Too much? Viable?

You seem to be a bit confused about what Tor and the Tor Browser are. Tor Browser is just a web browser with extra anonymity and tracking avoidance features (in the browser itself, and because it sends traffic through the Tor network). You visit sites you like and avoid sites you don't like, exactly like any other browser. It's not guaranteed to be anonymous: any sites you visit can record and track much of your behaviour there (just like with normal browsers), but third parties can't as easily snoop. Websites with .onion addresses are more resistant to tracking, as your traffic doesn't need to exit the Tor network to get to the destination, but Tor Browser can access most normal sites too.

I suggest you just try it.

It depends how much your friends and family care about anonymity online, because individual people's browsing behaviour can be unique and trackable - a browser cannot magically hide that. To really be confident of hiding successfully you need to do a lot more, and few people really need to or can be bothered.

E.g. I sometimes use the Tor browser at work to check whether local pages are accessible from outside the local network. There I don't care about anonymity, I just want a connection appearing to come from outside.

> any sites you visit can record and track much of your behaviour there (just like with normal browsers)

Tor Browser hides some of your information. For example it hides your IP address (that's the whole point of Tor). There are some other anti-tracking things built in.

> Websites with .onion addresses are more resistant to tracking

Tracking you or tracking the site? The point of .onion isn't to give the user any more protection, it's to give the website protection. With a .onion site you are unable to find the website's IP address.

>> Websites with .onion addresses are more resistant to tracking

> Tracking you or tracking the site? The point of .onion isn't to give the user any more protection, it's to give the website protection. With a .onion site you are unable to find the website's IP address.

True, but that's not why the BBC, Facebook, etc. have .onion hosts. I was thinking of the user, since the traffic between a Tor exit node and an open web server is exposed (modulo HTTPS).

Baloney. You are mixing up free and open internet with total and utter lawlessness. If someone posts CP as spam on the open web then I have reasonable surety the owners will swiftly deal with it because it is in their best interests to do so but on an onion site who cares. So I do have a reasonable belief I can't stumble accidentally on CP on the open web while I lack this belief with the Tor network.

Well moderated discourse is better than not because it filters out the trolls. It's not less free and open.

If someone posts CP as spam on a random onion site, it's reasonably going to get removed there too because it's disgusting and nobody wants to see that.

Moreover, knowing the passport numbers of the moderators is not a prerequisite to a site being well-moderated. It's possible to build and care enough to maintain a reputation under a pseudonym.

Meanwhile you have no actual guarantee that people won't post whatever they want on the open web. Anyone can host anything they want from any computer on the internet, including a compromised one when they don't want anyone to know who put it there. In other words, if you're willing to break the law then you can already be anonymous, so the thing Tor is enabling is for people who don't want to break the law to have anonymous communications.

It's like doing extreme sports or visiting North Korea or some such. There's risk vs benefits in every activity and browsing the "darknet" has extremely little benefit compared to the life ruining risk of CP finding its way on your laptop.

That's like arguing that going outside is too risky because you could be struck by a meteor. The probability that you accidentally stumble across CP and that somehow comes to the attention of law enforcement and they're unreasonable enough to prosecute you for it even though the evidence indicates that it was an accident, is lower than the probabilities of equally bad things happening as a result of equally innocuous things that people do on a regular basis.

Meanwhile you can still be struck by a meteor indoors. Go visit Facebook as the first person to view an image posted by a troll before it gets flagged, or on a day when Facebook was hacked but they don't know it yet.

>I would love to use Tor but I don't want to touch anything illegal. Ever. Is it possible?

The are 2 parts in Tor - the Tor browser and the Tor servers (relays and exit nodes).

You can use the Tor browser just like any other. Touching anything illegal can happen accidentally on the web, either because a web page downloaded a resource (image, cookie, etc) without your consent or because the definition of what is "illegal" changes from day to day and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction

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