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Comment by fastpoint | Hacker News Reader

And get myself on a watch list? No thanks.

More importantly, Tor has a significant amount of use by child abusers: https://www.wired.com/2014/12/80-percent-dark-web-visits-rel...

So there's not really a moral case for this either. You'd just be enabling paedophiles to cover their tracks.

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The fact that a brand new account account is feverishly trying to frame Tor as enabling abusers gives me confidence in the fact that Tor is actually really useful for circumventing censorship right now.

Child pornography users in most cases use the internet too. A lot of them have cars and drive on the road. We should boycott public infrastructure altogether since it can be used for bad actions.

The linked study revealed that around 80% of hidden service visits were to paedophile websites.

Is 80% of internet traffic child pornography imagery? Are 80% of cars driven by paedophiles? If not, your comparison makes no sense really.

Also, Tor isn't public infrastructure. It's a largely anonymous group of people who have collaborated to form an anonymising network. Everyone involved who is aware of the above is knowingly enabling the sexual abuse of children, by allowing the perpetrators to hide behind their network.

And from the same article

> Tor executive director Roger Dingledine followed up in a statement to WIRED pointing out that Tor hidden services represent only 2 percent of total traffic over Tor's anonymizing network.

So that's a 80% of 2% of the entire Tor traffic based on 2014 stats. Hardly comparable with stating a question like "Is 80% of internet traffic child pornography imagery?"

On top of that, the study is ~8y old and tells us nothing of the state of things today.

Dr Owen's presentation of the study: http://piped2bbch4xslbl2ckr6k62q56kon56ffowxaqzy42ai22a4sash...

Dingledine's follow-up: http://pzhdfe7jraknpj2qgu5cz2u3i4deuyfwmonvzu5i3nyw4t4bmg7o5...

This could be true in a way. I work at at an advertisement firm and know what everybody knows: videos and photos are waaaay more bigger than text, even if are Word files, so it consumes a way more traffic. 80% get's easily short. Edit: I'm assuming that people in the black won't traffic only text between them, my bad.

> So there's not really a moral case for this either. You'd just be enabling paedophiles to cover their tracks.

Let's ban knives makers because they allow people to get mugged. By making knives, they're enabling muggers to commit crimes.

Are the vast majority of knives being used to stab people?

The study I linked had the proportion of hidden service visits to paedophile sites at around 80% of the total.

It's such an alarming figure, it really should be in the Tor documentation as a warning of what you'll actually be enabling by running a node.

> Are the vast majority of knives being used to stab people?

This is a good point, but more on that below.

> It's such an alarming figure, it really should be in the Tor documentation as a warning of what you'll actually be enabling by running a node.

No, because even according to the article they are not even confident in their results. From DDoS attacks to law enforcement visiting those websites, it is impossible to assess.

> "We do not know the cause of the high hit count [to child abuse sites] and cannot say with any certainty that it corresponds with humans," Owen admitted in a response to the Tor Project shared with WIRED, adding that "caution is advised" when drawing conclusions about the study's results.

Human rights activists around the globe are relying on such infrastructure to have a safer way to communicate with the outside world and denounce actions of their governments. They are by far not the people who would click on the most hidden services, so they will be under-represented on such studies.

Sure encryption is used for unlawful behavior, but if you ban encryption and/or Tor, you will just hurt the people that need it the most while criminals will just find an alternative.

Are photos and videos like more large than text? Like 90%? This is Coriolanus http://shakespeare.mit.edu/coriolanus/full.html 317.9 KiB (325,563 bytes). This is HB frontage https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images... 1.2 MiB (1,217,366 bytes). Yeah 77%.

I think you asking the question wrong. It's "are the vast majority of people who are stabbed done so with a knife?".

> And get myself on a watch list? No thanks.

It's interesting to see people this scared of not being a role model citizen. Gives me a china vibe.

And then they got angry when you call a soft police state the place where they lives. No drama here, I was probably wrong.

Pretty much all countries do this stuff to some degree: In the US, be popular and possibly rich, and you can be more likely to get out of criminal charges. The credit system doesn't always really tell how responsible you are: live within your means and simply save money for things and drive used cars, and you'll have to pay more for a house loan. It doesn't matter if you've held a lease for the last 12 years if your landlord doesn't report the credit, same for utilities. Get a loan or else.

I'm not saying everywhere has the same level of surveillance and punishment for deviance, simply that everywhere has them in some form or another. Of course a few are going to remind you of other places. I suppose it is the totality and how they impact day to day life that makes the difference.

A lot of child abusers also use the Internet, so you should stop using it. They also use storage devices, SSDs HDDs, we should stop using those as well. And they use electricity, a lot...

Those are all things with extremely broad purposes, used by nearly everyone. Whereas Tor is incredibly niche, being a system explicitly designed to obfuscate network activity to make it difficult to impossible to track back to the originator.

Most people have absolutely no need to use Tor, but it's clearly very useful for child abusers looking to not get caught. That study reported 80% of hidden service visits were to paedophile websites. This really is not comparable in scale to how electricity, the internet, storage devices, and so on, are used.

> it's clearly very useful for child abusers looking to not get caught

And clearly very useful for activists and journalists to not get imprisoned and tortured because they revealed things they shouldn't have.

Well, that's what the Tor Project claims. It's good marketing, but they're essentially lying by omission here.

> It's good marketing, but they're essentially lying by omission here.

But so is the "clear Internet", really. Sure there is a high proportion of innocent traffic, but if you think in terms of criminal activities, I am sure it is non-negligible. From copyright infringement to child pornography to revenge porn to harassment to unlawful handling of data. I have no numbers to back it up, but I'm quite sure a lot of crimes are committed on the "clear net".

And yet, it would be very unreasonable to shut the Internet down over this. Punish the person and their actions, not their tools.

This is what I think. But no way to find it's true or not.

I used Tor in college to connect to the Silk Road to do a report on its use of Bitcoin (I didn't buy any drugs.)

Eliminating privacy to fix the pedo problem (that they exist) is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Protecting kids starts with protecting your actual kids, not recording your neighbors porn habits, purchase history, and political forum posts. Well intentioned or not, when you advocate for reducing the convenience of private comms, you harm more good people than bad. As long as the bad incentive exists, people will do the bad thing, whether it's a little hard or very.

You'd also be enabling the journalists who expose real world pedophiles and m/billionaire criminals, who ruin thousands of lives; and helping anyone who needs to fight against overwhelming power and has need for an internet, which is so many people in so many ways. It only takes 1% of traffic of this kind, to overshadow the horrible effects of even 80% (which is already a dubious number as pointed out), in terms of positive impact on the world.

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