Hacker News Reader

Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

The Tor project was largely funded by the US government initially. If you use Tor currently it's already that compromised, if you consider that an issue.

> If you use Tor currently it's already that compromised, if you consider that an issue

--That's a very bold claim. Got any extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claim?--

Edit: Misread! Thought you were claiming that tor was compromised. Not that tor was funded. My mistake

I crafted this conditional to make no actual claim at all. Personally I don't consider the funding an issue, their processes seemed sound. But if you do then Tor is pretty much a lost cause from the beginning.

Edit: no worries :-)

Notice the "that" in "that compromised".

It did not stop SELinux to be used everywhere.

Do you ask that in the comments of every project on the off chance?

This question is relevant when 1: one of the most important (perceived) adversarial is the NSA; 2: as of 2012, 80% of The Tor Project's $2 million annual budget came from the United States government; 3: the Underhanded C Contest exists and we can assume that however secure Rust is, writing underhanded Rust code is possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tor_Project#Funding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest

I'm not sure that follows. First, funding != code. And the Underhanded C Contest exists because C kind of sucks; since Rust largely exists specifically to solve the problems with C, I would like rather more compelling evidence that underhanded Rust is possible than pointing at C.

The perceived adversary is not the NSA. Tor is mean to protect agents and journalists from average state level actors. It is not meant to protect you from superpowers that control most of the internets backbone. I would trust tor to protect me from Assad (or some other dictator of a mid level power) I would not trust it to keep me safe from Putin or Xi.

Would it matter?

To many, yes.

To many on the internet which was financed by DARPA?

The irony is strong on this thread.

Perhaps you're forgetting that although the NSA have at times historically been regarded as good guys, they've since been found to quietly backdoor crypto products (etc) to others detriment.

That's a bit different from DARPA.

The NSA didn’t fund Tor, though.

Tor was initially funded by the Naval Research Lab (which is broadly similar to DARPA), and from a quick google, has received funding grants from the NSF and Department of State.

Do those same people also use SELinux?

Of course not. SELinux is functionally unusable due to it's historical ties. Which is a real shame, because the network limiting (used to be, it's been a while since I looked) is very easy to use and quite good.

So unusable that millions of people use it without knowing on their Android and ChromeOS devices.

SELinux is not unusable, it’s open source anyway.

Is that likely? People who don't trust things backed by the US gov't are unlikely to be fond of SELinux, but even beyond that, AppArmor is used in preference to SELinux by the Debian and SUSE families, which probably gives it a greater share of the Desktop Linux market (vs SELinux, mostly used by the Red Hat family) even without ideological/trust issues in play.

SELinux is turned on across all Android and ChromeOS devices.

I'm skeptical that there's much overlap between "people who seriously use TOR" and "people who use ChromeOS", but yeah Android is a fair point. (And I'll certainly grant that there are probably more Android devices out there than laptops/desktops running Debian derivatives.)

Dunno, is that relevant? Are any among us completely devoid of any inconsistencies or hypocrisy?

Given it was developed by NSA, completely relevant.

But Tor wasn’t, so it’s a derail to begin with

Tor was developed by the US Naval Research Laboratory to protect communications of the US intelligence community, so while it wasn't strictly developed by the NSA, if one considers products of the NSA contaminated by their connection to the US intelligence community, it's pretty hard not to see Tor as tainted in the same way.

Yes. Extra chance of backdoors. :/

Funding doesn't control code? It just controls what is being worked on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com