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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

Given that they have literally switched their nodes to be diskless and released lots of their work to strongly disable logging in systems, that may be acceptable for most users.

The risk model determines your behavior.

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Yeah I’m not trying to hide from the law, I’m trying to get the airline to stop giving me weird price quotes and bbc to let me stream their shows.

Well I am. I have a right to. If you want to have plausible deniability when you inevitably must do something legally wrong but morally right, then you must always be hiding.

You don't.

"Why did you suddenly download and install tor at 2am?"

"I wanted to watch a weird porn and didn't want anyone else to know"

Don't inconvenience your entire life for strictly theoretical situations.

No? Also I do struggle to think of a situation, for me, that would require TOR access in order to do something morally right but illegal.

The most obvious example: whistleblowing.

Fair enough, but I have no idea how that would require me to always use TOR, lest the insanely unlikely scenario arise that I need to expose some hidden information.

Also wait, whistleblowing on the government? I’m not privy to anything like that.

Maybe not now. But you don't know what your life will look like in 10 years, or even 20. People end up in politics more than they ever imagined, out of necessity. It's the OpSec equivalent of holding something behind your back and saying "no, there's nothing there." Makes you look even more guilty. You look a lot less guilty if you hold non-suspicious things behind your back often. Then people are more likely to think you're odd, rather than guilty. Kind of a bad example, but you get the point in the abstract.

Suddenly starting to join the Tor network often around the time some major information is leaked would be a strong correlator pointing to your guilt. I'm just using one example, but there are many scenarios where this matters.

Heh no, starting to access TOR is not suspicious or a correlator to anything, that’s the paranoia I’m talking about.

Also I wouldn’t use TOR for this anyway.

Alright man. It's not paranoia when it becomes reality, but you do you.

It’s paranoia when it’s not reality, which it isn’t based on your use of the future tense.

So by your logic, preparation for anything is paranoia?

> I’m trying to get the airline to stop giving me weird price quotes

Seems understandable.

> and bbc to let me stream their shows.

Have you paid your license fee?

I honestly have no idea how it works, I just know I can watch taskmaster when my vpn says I’m in London.

So when you say

> Yeah I’m not trying to hide from the law

what you really mean is more like "I'm cool piracy and breaking British laws, but other than that I'm not hiding from the law"?

Yea, I am cool breaking a British law nobody in my country has ever been prosecuted for breaking, but my point is I’m not hiding about that, it’s a tech problem I’m avoiding, not a legal one.

Given that they have SAID they are diskless, etc.

I feel like there is no scenario where it should be allowed to forget that all the claims are always falsifiable. Not saying they are lying, just that no one ever truly knows. It's important to not be complacent with that.

It's true we can't know for 100% certain, but things like third party audits can give one sufficient confidence (depending on your risk tolerance, of course)

https://www.assured.se/publications/Assured_Mullvad_relay_se...

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