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Comment by chaxor | Hacker News Reader

I always assumed businesses such as Cloudfare or Google would have a good reason to be the main IPFS or tor node hosts, since that can help improve the backbone infrastructure for this side of of the internet, and can also help catch bad actors if there are any there (easily turn in all logs to three letter agencies if they knock, or they can simply offer it up for anon tips).

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Google should run Tor? Yeah, that's an interesting idea, if you want to get rid of that annoying build in anonymity in tor which is its main purpose?

It's mostly navy run right now is my understanding, and used by journalists, so I don't see how it's that much of a downgrade.

It was started by the Navy way back in the '90s for secure communication online. Then the source was released like a year after being made public and development was funded by the EFF until the Tor Project itself was officially founded.

They still do (or did?) get grants from a few federal agencies though. But they had no strings attached. This is probably what you're thinking of.

Source: Hung out with a few Tor devs in Berlin a few years back. Including He Who Shall Not Be Named.

I think they meant it's believed that most/some exit nodes are run by US intelligence to spy on people. Not that development has anything to do with them now.

... They should host the big anonymous services for the purpose of being able to break that anonymity? Somehow I think that might not go over so well.

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