> It's almost impossible to seize and you control the keys. YOU ARE THE OWNER
This also remains true for Nostr.
But furthermore, as an operator of several Tor hidden services corresponding to public web services. I can assure you that many users, especially those on mobile devices, will stop using your service in large numbers if you direct them to a hidden service. iPhones don't allow background processes without special dispensation from Apple so the Tor/I2P circuit dies every time someone switches between apps. It's also an extreme development challenge, as they don't allow subprocesses either, and then of course your app will have to abide by the GPL at least for I2P (nonstarter for some). "Just ruin your experience for all iOS users and switch to the GPL for all your client code" is not a realistic suggestion. Not that Annas-Archive has a their own client app.
I don't know anything about Nostr since it does not focus on anonymity and isn't as old as Tor (more than 2 decades of research and application), I wouldn't rely on Nostr for anything serious.
I hope they follow the same pathway of The Pirate Bay or Rutracker.
Somehow it never got too the attention it deserved.
It was also the first known "altcoin"
You may own the keys but the non-profit The Tor Project owns the network. And when they decide to shut it down your "ownership" of the domain keys doesn't matter in the slightest. You might think this is a silly scenario but actually it happened in 2021/2022 when the tor project unilaterally decided to kill the entire Torv2 network and all domains were made inoperable. All links between sites, everything that made .onion a web, was lost.
The Tor Project does this whenever they feel that there's a security issue. It will happen again.
As someone that spent 10 years building completely legal community sites on the .onion network with the delusion of ownship it really hurt me. I'm never using .onion again. It is not a place to try to build communities. It is only for people that need 'security' as a highest priority and don't care if everything gets wiped out.
It's not only for high-security. It's for the state-of-the-art anonymity.
It doesn't matter that it was technical possible to try to manually reach out to random visitors of my sites and try to tell them that the entire domain name was changing. That didn't fix the web or links aspect at all.
Also relays (not exit nodes) are pretty safe to operate and running them is a decent thing, supporting free internet instead of a corporate ads machine, let's not frame it as a "crime support".
Well the purpose of using Tor is to prevent any network operators from knowing who you're talking to. Which AIUI is primarily a concern if either you're not allowed to talk to whoever ("great firewall" type things), or you risk getting in trouble for talking to whoever (Silk Road etc, or disfavored politics).
I guess if you're worried about hacks and doxxing rather than LE? Or if you only call things crime when they should be illegal rather than when they formally are?
That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network. And please, save the "criminal" bs (meant for the original comment).
This might not be how courts determine culpability of redistributing any potentially illegal content, of course.
Which is precisely the point of this discussion.
Might as well argue "By protecting the environment you're supporting the drug trade, because people that a climate catastrophe would wipe out will be able to be drug users".
What's "literally outlined" I'd guess is that the utility of the Tor network increases with adoption which nobody ever doubted.
What is discard is the tenuous over-stretched argument in this thread regarding fears of legality, that went like this:
GP: Using Tor browser and running a Tor node are different things, by using the browser you are not contributing to the network, you're just accessing it.
P: That's false to some extent. Tor's promise comes from it's vast population of users. The more users it has, the better it is to improve everyone's anonymity. So in a way, even by using it, you are helping Tor network.
As if that what was discussed...
And conversely, it's enough to visit a random website running WebTorrent or just a plain HTTP DDoS attack to possibly "use your connection for cybercrime".
Since RFC 3514 unfortunately never gained traction, distinguishing good, bad, and illegal traffic remains difficult.