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Comment by pacamara619 | Hacker News Reader

> It appears that somebody has made their own Tor client implementation and it fetches its dir info in a very rude way. If anybody knows details of it, please do let us know.

How is it possible for a "rude client" to cripple TOR in this way?

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If I were to attack the Tor project that's one of the cards I'd want in my quiver to mix metaphors with a blender; assume there's a deficiency in v2 addresses; having a weakness in the protocol that allows someone to "crash" v3 addresses and force everyone back to v2 for a period of time might be a one-time shot; but it could be worth playing the card if the stakes were high...

The coincidence of this with Parler and all the hoopla going on right now is interesting. Nothing to see, citizen, move along.

>The coincidence of this with Parler and all the hoopla going on right now is interesting. Nothing to see, citizen, move along.

Are you suggesting if there's a credible threat to the president elect at the inauguration that our 3-letter agencies shouldn't do everything in their power to stop it?

Yes. If "do everything in their power" includes crippling global resources. Of the US did this to the regular internet, the rest of the world would be pissed.

Directory servers, the DNS of Tor iirc, are a central point of failure I believe. I would guess it's hard to distribute this and keep queriers anonymous. Can do a DHT over Tor, but you still need known address list to bootstrap.

bittorrent uses DHT with hardcoded bootstrap nodes. Has that ever been taken down?

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