I then wonder what is the point of then including Tor.
> Access to this website has been blocked under an Order of the Higher Court.
> Any TalkTalk customer affected by the Court Order has a right under the Court Order to apply to vary or discharge it. Any such application must:
> (i) clearly indicate the identity and status of the applicant;
> (ii) be supported by evidence setting out and justifying the grounds of the application; and
> (iii) be made on 10 days notice to all of the parties to the Court Order.
> For further details click here. https://community.talktalk.co.uk/t5/Articles/Blocked-website...
They are not a budget offering, and they don't believe in "unlimited" bandwidth, but their prices are fair and the service is excellent.
It's the difference between hiding a joint in your safe so there's less chance the cops find it and marching to just make weed legal.
For most people there is FTTC or FTTP owned by "Openreach" the successor to the national telephone monopoly which thus owns most of the "last mile" of copper cable either under pavements in urban areas or hanging from telegraph poles elsewhere.
Openreach doesn't offer service to end users, its products are wholesale only, ISPs buy the wholesale product, at prices fixed by regulation, and sell Internet service (they also of course need to buy backhaul, routers, set up a call centre and so on, Openreach just makes the "last mile" work)
Thus, most big UK ISPs are using Openreach and you could switch to any of the others (including A&A), in principle literally overnight, since all the physical infrastructure is unchanged, just somebody has to plug different values into a database so they're billing a different ISP and your traffic goes to that ISP not the previous one.
[ Under the hood it's slightly more complicated because you can buy some backhaul from Openreach or from competitors who own long distance fibres. In a major city it may be cheaper to use some startup to get 10Gbps of data from your customers in that city to your data centre in another city, after Openreach gathers it all up somewhere, rather than paying Openreach, who also own fibre, to move that data to your data centre. ]
The main exception is if you have cable TV in your area (most larger cities, some suburban regions) you can choose to buy the DOCSIS service from the only company that owns all large cable TV service in the UK, Virgin Cable. In this case Virgin is your only possible ISP. For maybe 10% of UK residents this is the most practical way to get "good" Internet access, a larger percentage could buy this, but they could also switch to an ISP using Openreach and still get acceptable Internet access.
A relatively small number of users live somewhere with no decent Internet via Openreach, no cable TV, but enough local enthusiasm plus money to bury fibre and build their own network. In these cases again the only ISP is the one that buried the cable, but they're usually community owned, so I guess if they do censorship (and I don't know if they do) you'd be better placed to argue that policy should change than I am.
In a city yeah, it'll make sense for some startup to run a few miles of fibre to deliver Internet just to properties likely to want to pay extra for fast service, and they would own that fibre, but they'll have competitors so there's less threat of problems.
For Openreach there's a web site (and an API) to basically plug in an identifier for a telephone line and get out what wholesale products are available for that location. ISPs could in principle find that you have 300Mbps fibre available, and even though you purchased their cheap 1990s-style ADSL service they decide to pay Openreach to enable fibre, but then they just clamp the data flow to 10Mbps so you're not getting a better service. I don't think that would make any commercial sense, but they could do that if it makes sense to them.
A friend lives not very far from me on a weird little road near the university that just sort of runs down a hill to nowhere. That road isn't "adopted" (it is notionally owned by some of the people who live on it, and local government won't pay to fix it) and it turns out this meant they didn't get FTTC. So they just did a fundraiser to pay Openreach to run FTTP into their road. I was shocked somewhere like that doesn't have modern Internet so I donated a little money.
When the work finishes the residents don't magically get (better) Internet service, but they will have fibre, that'll appear in the API and so then they can buy fast services which they'd previously not be eligible for because the ISP does an API call and sees there's no fibre option.
If you're wealthy you could sidestep all this and pay Openreach to run FTTP specifically to your home, but I'd guess that as well as being expensive (not new Ferrari expensive, but a lot more than a new MacBook) this would put you in some huge queue of weird vanity projects for which Openreach has finite workers available. So maybe they don't dig a trench until 2022.
A) In order to drive Tor adoption and increase the feasibility of normal people hosting sites on Tor, it is necessary that normal people be able to connect to hidden services, even if they themselves are not necessarily reaping the privacy benefits.
If Firefox and Chrome both supported the Tor protocol out of the box then I would be more likely to host content on Tor, because I wouldn't need to tell my family and friends to install a new browser just to access that content.
B) Even though Brave's Tor features are inferior to the Tor browser, they still probably offer some privacy benefit over normal browsing (assuming users are not assuming that the mode is perfectly private).
That being said:
A) It would still be better for Brave to fix issues like this over time, and the leak is worth taking seriously instead of brushing off as a known issue.
B) A warning on a FAQ is not sufficient to handle point B. Brave should be looking into UX methods to make it clear to users that visiting a Tor site does not make them anonymous. Most of the people installing Brave are never going to see that warning.
Besides, assuming you live in the West, as long as you aren’t you’re planning a terrorist attack, watching child porn, selling drugs, weapons, assassinations, bomb making materials, etc, then brave will probably do
I would still use TOR for pretty much any dark web activities, but in practicality, as long as you aren’t doing anything that you can imagine a policeman actively hating you for, it’s probably pretty safe
Also, I can imagine some instances where you want to obfuscate your IP location to the visited site/service, but don't much care if your DNS requests leak because you're more concerned about the accessed site/service generating a patchwork of locations associated with a specific user and less concerned about your ISP or DNS provider knowing generally that you connect to the site/service.