Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

I think it says something when Russian state ordered blocking of many things on the web, iirc including VPNs—but afaik never got around to blocking Tor. Don't really know about the entry relays, but I think the site itself would be blocked if they decided to do it.

Though this might be due to cops wanting to keep their own local ‘war on drugs’ going on. The statistics won't improve themselves, you know. And I know for certain that cops are aware of Tor and what people do on it.

Edit: wow, fastest downvotes in the West are coming immediately after posting in this thread. Like, less than ten seconds passed.

Upd: somebody posted a reply but deleted it before I started typing my own (what's even happening here?), so here goes. What I'm saying is that I can only wonder why Russia doesn't block Tor and would very much like to know the reason. However, I do think that the FSB might be interested in hijacking Tor traffic, even if just for shits and giggles at first. And buying some boxes in Hetzner probably isn't a problem for them. Don't forget also that FSB directly works with several criminal hacker groups here, and having both their own masqueraded Tor routes and hijacking others' traffic might be vaguely titillating for those people.

As for blocking Tor, I already mentioned that the site would be easily blocked with existing measures, as would relay IPs. For more covert nodes, afaik DPI is being implemented across the providers currently, on RosKomNadzor's orders. So I guess we might yet see Tor blocked on the protocol level (possibly along with Telegram?).

Probably they want to know who is actually using Tor, instead of knowing what is being transported through it.

That's one of my suspicions and why I think you'd want to masquerade Tor itself behind three layers of protocols here, in light of emerging DPI. You don't want cops to knock on your door one day, with a baggie of white stuff in their pocket ready to migrate to one of yours.

You may try to use Tor through VPN's.

This is the fundamental problem with TOR, and by extension, any other anonymity client whose traffic patterns stand out from everybody else's.

Just using it makes you automatically interesting to state actors.

Hence why it's important that everybody use it for innocuous reasons. Benefit is two-fold: it helps users with something to hide (eg. journalists, human rights activists) stick out less, and in the event you have something to hide, makes it less suspicious for you to use.

Tor doesn't provide enough value that users will use it. The average person will not partake unless it gives them value or it's free. Expecting anything else is a fantasy

I am not so sure about that. The top usage of tor is according to one study, by domain: Facebook, google, blackplanet, yandex, bittorent index, photobucket, craigslist.

...And that's where torrent sites and government blocks come in.

I mean, UK's move against porn is even bolder, but I doubt it that Tor handles video well.

I just tested YouTube, Vimeo, and PBSKids.

YouTube blocked the network request as suspicious though I was able to view the main page fine; I did not try creating a new circuit.

The Vimeo video played perfectly fine.

I kept creating new circuits until the exit node was US, and then the PBSKids video played fine.

YouTube works fine and has for years. Earlier this year Google started blocking some requests and due to the use of a redirect you often need to create a `New Identity` to get around it. It _usually_ helps if you visit the youtube.com homepage first, though.

That's an interesting perspective. I live in Kazakhstan and Kazakhstan blocks popular VPNs as well. But it blocked Tor many years ago (although I think that you can access it with enough trickery, but you can't just access its website and you can't just run downloaded Tor and bootstrap it) for ordinary users.

May be there're not enough juridical grounds in Russia to block Tor. But I doubt it, they tried to block Telegram when they wanted to... May be opposition does not use Tor, so it's out of sight.

> May be there're not enough juridical grounds in Russia to block Tor

That long since stopped being a problem for the state here, in general. But also, Tor is explicitly against the law that regulates VPNs—since proxy-like services must block the same sites that are blocked by RosKomNadzor, to be allowed.

There is a lot of space to speculate on why, with only sparse data of the internal discussions within the Russian state. What little information that has leaked do show that tor is listed as something that some individuals within the government want to block, but as it stand, it hasn't happened yet.

My own guess is the simple "follow the money" default stance on issues like this. Tor is likely enabling profits for people within the government, and turning it off has low enough political benefits in comparison. Turning off a west operated VPN has likely a very different economic trade off so it get blocked while tor does not. A direct example off that, with a few implication about the Russian government, is that that tor provide access to hidden service market places while other forms of VPNs do not.

Yeah, that's also interesting to think about. Like, when you forbid something to plebs, you don't really want to cut off the ability for yourself too—there's that ‘research agency’ which needs to run things on Twitter, or whatever comes up tomorrow. So you'd think sysadmins would come up with something so others can't use Tor but you and buddies can.

But maybe that would mean giving the sysadmins too much inside info.

I also discovered recently that the FSB and company aren't considered monolithic, and a few departments are doing their own things in a sort of ‘competition’. So yeah, it might be that some of them want Tor and don't want the hassle of setting up the exclusions.

from what i heard over 50% of Tor nodes in Iran run by the government to track dissidents. I can only imagine what that number is in Russia where every sever is essentially hosted in government-controlled building.

IIRC you can choose the country of the exit node for your Tor route. And I doubt it that anyone chooses Russia except when looking at what the web is like from here.

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