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Comment by bdhcuidbebe | Hacker News Reader

Wanna know about something cool? Tor i offers real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.

It was also developed by the United States Navy and has been criticized for not being as secure as it claims it is. This should come as no surprise since the US military and agencies have a history of demanding backdoors in software, which just means more attack vectors for outsiders to sniff out.

I make no claims that commercial VPNs are more secure, but at least they have some level of interest in keeping their promises if people are paying them, whereas a free service does not carry the same incentive.

Pick your poison, I guess.

>It was also developed by the United States Navy

Cool, sounds like an organization that is heavily incentivized to make their communication hard to intercept and eavesdrop on.

The navy backdoor claims are unsubstantiated FUD unless you can point them out in the freely available and accessible code. Not to mention that they created the tool to also use themselves.

They also haven't had any influence or control in the development of todays tor project that has existed for over 20 years and despite a massive amount of attacks and research there has never been found anything.

That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.

> That does not mean there aren't serious drawbacks that are more worth pointing out such as why bother with a very complex and noisy backdoor when you can just covertly create enough nodes to do traffic correlation.

Winner winner chicken dinner.

FVEY's annual budget is $1.7bn + $1bn + $122mm (NZ :3) + $4.6bn + $classified billion.

You think those guys can't mount a Sybil attack against https://metrics.torproject.org/ ?!

to be fair tor project is monitoring new nodes so it would need to be done slowly over time. still its the biggest threat to the network hence everybody should consider running no/low risk guard and middle nodes.

> real untraceable anonymity and is 100% free.

And 50% of the time it works every time...

A lot of things simply don't work if you're using tor. You get blocked, you get blacklisted, accounts get terminated, and so on.

I generally agree, but the same thing also happens to Mullvad exit nodes (though not to the same degree.) Imgur is perpetually "over capacity", breaking images across multiple websites. Twitch tells me "your browser is not supported, try Chrome or Firefox" when trying to log in on Firefox. Netflix blocks all regional content, etc. Not to mention the constant Cloudflare captchas. I once had to use Tor because Mullvad was blocked (creating a foreign Steam account)

Google Search comes to mind as the most Tor-hostile website though, and that allows Mullvad just fine.

Run Mullvad over Tor instead of Mullvad over this Obscura thing ;-)

tor generally doesn't recommend running vpn over tor makes any of your opsec any more safer , in fact I can argue that it makes your opsec worse

but if a website is working on mullvad and not on tor and you are forced to use that website , then yes compromise your opsec a little bit I suppose

The point is not opsec but speed, under the GP's assumption that Mullvad exit nodes have better reputation than tor exit nodes. Not sure if the case, I don't use Mullvad.

I was talking about tor + mullvad where you first connect to tor then mullvad instead of obscura for connecting to a website where mullvad is allowed and tor is blocked like google(google's basically useless in tor thousands of captcha and then sorry mate we can't)

so I would argue that tor + mullvad is still a worse opsec than tor and it still has roughly the same / slightly worse speed with tor.

but I would also argue that tor + mullvad is a better model than obscura + mullvad for opsec but not for speed.

TLDR: Don't use tor with vpn's unless you are forced to (like website block , because then you are kind of forced to reduce your opsec a little bit)

There does not exist a system or method to make a signal truly 100% untraceable. What you can do and tor does is severely weakening the odds of the tracing being successful by increasing the amount of work and involved parties thereby improving the odds that the tracing never reaches the actual origin.

Tor for me is unusable because of its speed.

Not enough exit nodes.

In many countries using Tor can get you in trouble.

That's going to be the case for using Obscura as well?

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