And was reminded about the Tor network. In ~2012, it was talked about so much, but in the current year, I barely see it discussed.
Do people just assume it's compromised and thus dead?
(I am aware it's mentioned in that thread, btw. But the point still stands - it's rarely talked about anymore.)
Subjectively, more sites block it now mostly through their CDN (Cloudflare or endless Google Captchas or whatever), but by and large it's still very, very "usable".
Just my opinions below, please feel free to school me. I think the "benefits" are theoretically twofold still, same as ever was:
1. I think it's safe to OPERATE on the basis that it's compromised or heavily subject to attack somehow, just like anything online. But I think it's still at least another LAYER of obfuscation or headache or whatever, in theory, at least for basic marketing annoyances and the like. Yeah, maybe it's largely pwnd, I have no way of knowing that for sure. Or maybe there's AI and timing attacks that are really good, I don't know, I see gross incompetence in some places and apparent competence in others, so no idea on this area. And maybe you need JS off which most sites fail on. But it's at least not making IP fingerprinting easy or giving in to another more-pwnd commercial VPN providers, etc., etc. etc.
2. IMO, a big altruistic reason for using Tor browser, would be that one helps the people who actually need it (say, dissident journalists in developing nations that lack freedom of speech and rule of law) get the "cover" that they need to avoid unfair treatment, by creating enough noise/traffic to get lost in, or something.
What'd I miss?
One of Tor's weaknesses has always been the exit node problem, where things can be seen in the clear unless encryption is used. And sometimes it's not used, so personal data can be gleaned through exits.
Another weakness is the Tor Browser Bundle itself. I'm not certain if it's 'compromised' but we'll never know, due to the secret nature of 0-days. People don't take extra caution and connect to Tor with a specialized Tor router with a kill-switch / fail-closed system, thereby mitigating real IP leaks.
There's also a more academic in nature problem of a 'bird's eye view' of the Tor network, whereby if you control and have insight into all the hops a Tor user makes, you can do correlation attacks, but I'm less concerned about that than the other two weaknesses I mentioned.
You might be hearing less about it because the world is currently enamored with AI.