What do we want Tor for except as a hope that Russian citizens might be able to get to the BBC site?
I am asking honestly - and would prefer not to be told my own government is on the verge of a mass pogrum so we had better take precautions.
If everything is SSL secured, then we don't have to explain why any specific thing is SSL secured. The same reason can be applied to use of TOR.
Even for top level comments, HN’s algorithm for ranking is pretty useful for assigning “worth”
Ordering by score DESC only gives you relative point information, not absolute. Theres additional signal if the top comment has 100 points vs only having 3 (and the bottom post also having 100 vs 1).
"Yeah but Y Combinator made a decision that makes it harder for me to auto-generate spam."
I think everyone wants “privacy by default”, they just don’t make the connection between this hypothetical and real life. In real life you’re still spied but nobody confronts you directly.
I mean he probably could hear it, and I hope no one on HN who heard their neighbour would bring it up on the street !
We do not have secrecy. We have privacy which is merely the politeness of our neighbours (which is of course a social construct of behaviour).
The internet has given new spaces that have not yet had the time for us to learn such behaviours. What will help us is making the internet more like our daily lives. No anonymity, etc.
But people somehow think the internet should be different - it’s not and it’s better - if we think our lives should be more free then politics is the pave for that not the router.
The internet is different. There are trade offs to privacy just like the real world, but it is not physical. Encryption exists. It protects real people from real governments that feature oppressive regimes. It protects them _now_, not in some distant future where N protests, elections or uprises have toppled all government entities that abuse their power. This seems to be a lofty ideal that we should all trust each other, our governments, our isps, our web services.
I think the crucial part is choice. You are welcome to blog every wikipedia article you visit, or live stream every activity you partake in over Twitch. But this is not a requirement to use the internet.
Also a lot of people wouldn’t appreciate their neighbor talking (or even hearing) about them having sex.
Using Tor this way doesn’t anonymize me—on Facebook at least, I’m logged in under my own account—but it limits the profile Meta builds on me to the union of what it directly observes on Facebook and what it can purchase through data brokers. Ever since I started doing this, I’ve noticed a huge drop in relevance in my Facebook ads, so apparently it’s working. When the ads become suddenly relevant again (which has happened a few times), it exposes an information leak: usually a credit card purchase that Meta must have obtained from either my bank or the shop vendor and tied to my identity.
Using a VPN could theoretically provide the same benefit, but in practice Facebook tended to temporarily lock my account when using a VPN and Reddit blocks VPN traffic completely. So I stick to the onion services, which are run by the websites themselves and so are less likely to be treated as malicious traffic.
If you use these platforms, I recommend bookmarking their onion sites in Tor Browser and using it as your primary interface to them for a while. Then, if you don’t find it too inconvenient, start blocking the non‐onion versions of the sites on your network.
https://old.reddittorjg6rue252oqsxryoxengawnmo46qy4kyii5wtqn...
https://www.facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg...
(P.S.: You shouldn’t trust the links I just posted; I could have posted fake ones! I recommend double‐checking against https://github.com/alecmuffett/real-world-onion-sites which links to proofs of onion site ownership under their usual domain names.)
We've come to accept (as a normal mainstream thing) end to end encryption in several popular messaging apps (which seems to be largely thanks to WhatsApp?), but the same idea applied to web browsing is still considered fringe for some reason. That distinction seems arbitrary to me, like just a cultural thing?
It might be a UX thing though. WhatsApp is pleasant. Trying to use the internet normally over Tor is horrendous (mostly thanks to Cloudflare either blocking you outright, or sending you to captcha hell).