Nobody that’s not halfway suicidal is running exit nodes on their home machines (I won’t, I don’t want police knocking on my door).
And just for the onionspace… yeah I saw some bad stuff there. After what I saw I don’t think anonymity is a good idea. There is darkness inside people that lack of rules, lack of order, lack of accountability brings out.
This is a somewhat one-sided way of thinking.
Tor is a tool that can be used for useful things as well as misused for bad things (like a knife or a truck). Now, leaving aside the fact that websites related to credit card fraud, child pornography, and terrorism also have a large presence on the Clearweb.
Also, I'd like to note that Instagram is a global hub for human trafficking, and the moderators' stories don't sound any more innocuous than the Onion stories.
I use Tor daily and abide by the law, but don't want to miss the anonymity or pseudonymity of a Whonix VM and a Tails session.
Since I've been hosting Tor Nodes since I was 14, I don't have to worry about showing up on blacklists of 3-letter organizations, since I've been on top for over a decade anyway.
Honest question: why do people host exit nodes when they aren't 14 anymore?
Given how dangerous it is to host one, and how little personal benefit one gets from it, I kinda assumed most exit nodes are hosted by three-letter agencies from various countries. Is that so? If not, how so?
But anyway, to answer your question: mustard gas is not one thing, it's a class of chemicals. But one of them became the first ever chemotherapy drugs, Mustine:
In the end Toe is just a legacy project from the CIA/NSA that has outlived it's usefulness. The NSA has certainly redteamed all the ways to take it down or uncloak users, if needs be, so it's not even a tool against a potential fall into dictatorship of the USA.
Actually, this isn't true: Tor with private Snowflake bridges can be very effective against the Great Firewall. I'm an activist who works in this area and I've spoken with activists who were using it as recently as this year.
The issue is scaling bridge discovery, since any automated bridge discovery mechanism rapidly exposes available bridges to a determined censor. But any team doing high profile, notable, or sensitive work can find an individual or organization outside China to provide them with private bridges. So Tor is one effective option now for key activists in China, just not a mass-scale solution for everyone.
And as others have pointed out, Tor wouldn't scale if everyone was using it. Contrast this with I2P which not only would scale but become more resistant to DDOS attacks with the more nodes on the network. Unlike For, I2P has no distinction between nodes, mostly because it's not designed to be an outproxy. But no, let's keep insisting that everyone use a deep state tool with chronic flaws because reasons. /s
One objection a lot of people in this thread have to using Tor is the (misconception) that they'll be relaying Tor traffic. (It doesn't work this way in Tor.) But what you're saying is that i2p will scale because this is the default behavior in i2p. But is that what people want?
Also, hidden services have been harder for Tor to scale than exit nodes, at least in the past few years. I don't think this is the result of the fact that Tor provides exit nodes. I think it's just a result of the onion service connection process being a series of fragile steps.
I do agree that supporting traffic to the web results in the Tor dev team prioritizing this use case over traffic to hidden services, but that's understandable given that it's the vast majority of their traffic and usage.
Um. I'm pretty sure that nodes relaying Tor traffic is the fundamental principle underlying Tor.
Everyone relays Tor traffic when using it.
This should be assumed. So what?
In 2023, almost every website supports https and unencrypted traffic is the exception, not the rule. So if someone sets up an exit node, they can only collect metadata from a few circuits from a competent user. Of course, this becomes a problem when someone sets up hundreds or thousands of nodes, but that - including statistical analysis or the use of 0-days - can only be done by a small minority.
Maybe, but it's nothing in comparison the darkness that comes out of people who want rules and someone held accountable.
Any ideas for how to eradicate it without authoritarianism?
This extends to social networking too. As much angst as there is about moderation, it’s a feature people want.