Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Sadly the anonymity part (at tleast as meant a few years ago) is not true anymore...

Live in a shitty country, want to tweet the truth without your government finding out and treating you like Assange? Just use tor, make a social network account and publish the truth!

And the reality? Every cloudflare based site first gives you a long and hard captcha. Then you try to register an account, and again, one of thoss arkose labs[0] captchas. Then after rotating the 7th image in the right orientation, you finally get your twitter/facebook/instagram/whatever account... you try make a first tweet/..., bam, your account closed, you need to verify with a phone number. You buy a disposable prepaid sim card, risk exposing yourself, and again get banned. A bunch of services even block tor exit nodes directly by IP.

Yeah, sure, you can run a hidden service, and all three users, that know how to use tor and find that address will see your writings, but reaching wide audiences is impossible.

yeah, i know it's just a rant, but it's a pain still

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ArkoseLabs/comments/o4ab5r/minecraf...

This has been my experience also and people shouldn't have to feel that privacy is only needed if you want to say something with life-threatening implications where people might take more extreme measures.

The excuse given is that Tor is used for abuse but I really doubt that and I doubt banning the exit node IP addresses is the appropriate fix. My opinion is corporations don't want anonymous people using their site and second that blocking Tor is sold by snake oil salesmen for network products.

Sad indeed, take a look at BisonRelay, it is built on top of Lightning Network, no surveillance possible, no accounts, true privacy.

https://bisonrelay.org/

Some articles explaining a bit how and why:

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/09/Trapped-in-the-Web/

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/14/Bison-Relay-The-Sovereign...

What's worse is that the few in control of TOR refuse to update their threat model (which is almost 20 years old) and implement solutions for this. I guess their Navy bosses want to keep access for "the good guys inc".

I am unsure what TOR developers can do to with twitter/facebook/instagram. The platforms business model is to collect personal information in order to sell advertisements, and blocking people who they can't identify is a business decision.

Tor could create their own society network but that will do nothing for people who need to reach people on those platforms.

This whole thing is annoying, but not really a threat to anonoyminity per se.

Also there isn't really good technical solutions.

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

Yeah I keep forgetting, I even read a whole article about that and the origins of the name.

"Yeah, sure, you can run a hidden service, and all three users, that know how to use tor and find that address will see your writings, but reaching wide audiences is impossible."

That's actually exactly what some folks want. To communicate privately with a small network of family/friends/colleagues. Tor does not have to be for everybody. If onion services only appeal to those people who bother to learn how to use them, then that's fine. What's important is that onion services work.

The silver lining of it being impossible to reach wide, i.e., large, audiences with onion services is that this means there is no incentive for advertising and thus no incentive for so-called "tech" companies to act as eavesdropping, centralised intermediaries under the guise of providing "free services".

Some folks might not want Google to snarf their content and try to profit from it in some way, or have Facebook offer them up as a highly specific demographic ad target.

Yes, it is sad. Even if you would get through and publish a tweet, interest groups would flag and downvote, so you'd have no reach.

It is very hard for an individual to get out the truth against large groups and a preconditioned public opinion.

I don't disagree that platforms develop immune systems against various statements.

I just wonder what truths you have been attempting to divulge that are being censored.

I imagine that it's very difficult for a North Korean to discuss things openly on the Internet, and that people in less restrictive authoritarian societies need to be cautious in how they do it to avoid suspicion. Still, Americans like me do learn things about Russia and China that they would rather us not find out and discuss.

I'm not sure you can downvote a tweet, and ratioing a tweet usually increases its reach. The weird thing about Twitter is that for things to disappear they had to actively delete, or the tweeter deletes to avoid embarrassment.

Masterfully done! Attribute things to a poster that he hasn't said, compare censorship to an immune system and then go on to drag Russia and China into the equation.

All very calmly and with a superior attitude.

You can create a Protonmail address with Tor and share the information that Way... Or you could use secureDrop to send the information to journalists

How's SecureDrop in Belmarsh nowadays?

Do they even have internet access in that prison?

True, but they will still force sms verification for that from a TOR connection.

I created several Protonmail accounts using Tor and was not required to do SMS verifications... That was a few months ago

I tried a few days ago, and it was.

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

Good point

With I2P network you prob won't get banned. You can host and specify an outproxy also.

good luck using anything with recaptcha.

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