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Comment by TheAdamAndChe | Hacker News Reader

It scares me that posts like this always write of Tor like it's not compromised.

I browsed Tor regularly between 2011 and 2013. Late 2012 and early 2013 brought the most precipitous drop in deviant material. Before then, you couldn't throw a stone without coming upon CP(I avoided it like the plague but knew it was there), you could buy literally any drug on the Silk Road safely, and you could easily find bomb-making and asymmetric warfare information. Nowadays? Not so much.

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I agree but for different reasons. There is no financial incentive to run a TOR node-- it's expensive and opens you to real legal risks. Therefore most nodes are run by universities and unknown actors-- in any case they are almost all funded by the state. If I was a nation state it would make my job much EASIER if I corralled all of the bad actors into a network that has a handful of defined exit points more or less under my control. The entire notion is absurd. I2P is actually more secure because it routes traffic dynamically rather than trusting a centralized "authority"

> Before then, you couldn't throw a stone without coming upon CP(I avoided it like the plague but knew it was there), you could buy literally any drug on the Silk Road safely, and you could easily find bomb-making and asymmetric warfare information. Nowadays? Not so much.

I'm sure CP existed and exists on the dark web, but I think it's an exaggeration to say "you couldn't throw a stone without coming upon CP". A few years back I spent quite a bit of time on tor (research purposes), and thankfully never once just stumbled upon CP - I'm sure it's there, but you're going to have to go looking for it.

While Silk Road isn't around any more, other drug marketplaces pop up as soon as one dissappears - it's still very, very easy to buy any drug you want. Next day delivery of heroism? Easy. You've 3 big threats with buying drugs on the darkweb though:

1) The site pulling an exit scam, dissappearing with all the escrowed funds 2) Your seller pulling an exit scam, taking money for as long as possible without sending any drugs, then leaving the market 3) The site being compromised by the feds - it's actually quite difficult to run a watertight site on the darkweb, so this does happen

I think it's an exaggeration to say "you couldn't throw a stone without coming upon CP".

It was on every single Hidden Wiki at the time.. it _was_ everywhere, and commonly linked to from sites like 4chan.

other drug marketplaces pop up

Sure, but nothing like the Silk Road. In a winner-take-all market like the online marketplace market, you would expect a top dog to emerge.

When did you do your research? The difference I noticed began late 2012.

It was post Silk Road that I started reading researching - I forget exactly, but may around 2015/2016?

There were huge markets after Silk Road, though admittedly I don't know how size compared to Silk Road (e.g. AlphaBay, Agora, Nucleus, Hansa).

AlphaBay was like 10x the size of the original Silk Road.

DNM's haven't been the same since the busts of AlphaBay and Hansa in close succession.

Can corroborate, 2012 is when I stopped using Tor for anonymity because a lot of busts happened all in a row. Every bust had some sort of Silk Road style clearnet mistake associated with it, but parallel construction felt like the real answer. A bunch of sites that had been fine for years don't suddenly all make tiny fatal mistakes at the same time.

I'm sure any operators that didn't get busted realized the heat had showed up and chose to shut down. When you are facing 20 years in jail you don't need hard evidence that Tor is broken to decide to walk away.

I spent one single night exploring the dark web in 2011, stumbled on that on the first night.

Scrubbed my drives, poured bleach in my eyes and swore off TOR forever. I'd agree that at the time, it was rampant.

However, it was during the same time that the FBI had set up their Operation Torpedo so it's quite possible those were heavily advertised on purpose as a trap.

Either way, it's sickening and another proof that we can't have nice things. Give a dark-web to mankind and the first thing they do is upload disgusting illegal porn to it (I am not talking about kinks but actual criminal activity).

> Next day delivery of heroism? Easy.

Damn, screw my "hero's journey," this sounds way more straightforward. :P

Perhaps there is more money to be made via the Dark Web these days, so those people selling things have a vested interest in not making it scary to use it.

If I was a Dark Web Drug Kingpin, I would want to lessen the stigma of using the Dark Web, and that means trying to DDoS unsavory sites, convince other sites not to link to it, and the like.

Because governments are wiretapping the entire internet they can track down any server they can connect to live regardless of the protocol or number of indirections (this could be prevented with Freenet-style distributed hosting), but the actual downfall of the dark web seems to be web technology and outsourcing hosting. Last I checked Tor browser didn't disable javascript even on .onion sites (restricting HTML to a subset and requiring CSP would go a long way), and when sites share hosting they tend to go down all at once.

It's been years since I've used Tor browser but there were warnings everywhere about not enabling JS, and I'm pretty sure it was disabled by default.

Do you mean that the entire system is compromised or just that individual sites are? Because it sounds like you are painting with a very broad brush here.

I consider it likely that the entire system is compromised. I saw with early Tor that if a network is both truly anonymous and advertises itself as truly anonymous, deviant material is accessible everywhere. Tor didn't stop advertising itself as anonymous yet defiant material is a lot rarer, which tells me that it may not be as anonymous nowadays as they say.

This isn't proof of anything except that the makeup of content there has changed over time. You can find write ups of how people like Dread Pirate Roberts or other large Marketplace players were caught and it doesn't seem like it was due to compromises in Tor, naturally if there are backdoors that 3 letter agencies are using they wouldn't advertise it but that doesn't seem to be the case.

It might be compromised, but there is alternative explanation, people who don't agree with defiant content do there best to shut it down. (eg. over time there are more people attacking hosting with some defiant content for fun)

Do you have any proof that tor is compromised?

There's a lot of evidence to the contrary. I don't mean to be rude, but your assertion sounds quite hollow and baseless. I'm certainly interested in any evidence you would have that shows tor is compromised.

How exactly did you "browse Tor"? I don't really know how you could find e.g. the Silk Road unless you were specifically looking for drugs.

Hidden wikis. Other Tor sites linked to other sites. There were also a lot of Tor threads in 4chan and reddit at the time.

It's nothing now like it was then.

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