Tor connections against normal sites use 3 hops while they use 6 hops against onion sites. Controlling or potentially even analysing the traffic from 2 of the hops is enough to know where the user connects to (it might be 4 hops for the onion case but I am not sure). I am pretty sure that NSA has enough resources for their own nodes. I2P has a better architecture in general but it still does not solve the issue. I am looking into evaluating lokinet at the moment.
In general tor does not have a great track record. For example they took ages to upgrade from an 80-bit sha-1 truncated address scheme with dh1024 and aes128 into something more modern.
That aside, what do you concretely propose as alternatives to TOR for the seriously privacy-conscious (and those, such as activists and dissidents, who need anonymity in a life-or-death way.
This does not really help regarding what I mentioned.
> using said machines or TOR alone from an IP address that isn't one's own identifiable address
Slightly better I guess but in most cases you can still be identified.
> what do you concretely propose as alternatives to TOR for the seriously privacy-conscious
Honestly, no idea. I would keep using tor for the time being but we really need an alternative.
Do you have something that you disagree with? If so just say it.
I.e. either always use HTTPS sites, or .onion sites. No HTTP unencrypted sites.
Dissidents and activists have been busted using Tor and there’s always a friendly government damage control agent ready to pop up (any forum, any time of day) to remind people that Tor couldn’t possibly be backdoored or owned, it was always some other type of thing they used in parallel construction.
Over-shilling is what clued next in. You don’t get this kind of response without a massive panopticon dispatching reputation managers. Why the heck would the NSA write NSA proof software? LOL.
EDIT: this is in reply to mapgrep and his crew:
Did I say I won't use Tor Browser? Is it really necessary to put words into my mouth to make your point? I've noticed this a lot with people who are very very lightning fast, almost unbelievably fast, to defend Tor on any forum or platform on the Internet. The speed at which it occurs, and the typical over-the-top, rude, and unnecessary attempts to make people seem to say things they 100% have not.
You should apologize. Obviously the NSA has broken Tor, they made it. Forget about current funding, where'd it originate?
And why does the Tor Project publish a list of exit nodes?
We should absolutely be aware of funding sources, skeptical of code written by other people, etc, but if you were to actually enforce in your life a position that you won’t use any security or privacy technology with funding ties to the USG you will quickly find yourself in quite an untenable position.
Some others (such as chacha20) are pretty popular too. This is the only cipher used by wireguard and one of the ciphers used by ssh and tls.
> was designed by the NSA
No it was not. It was designed by two Belgian cryptographers (the same ones that did SHA3).
> for asymmetric crypto
Symmetric
No offence but you seem quite clueless.