Hacker News Reader

Comment by Achshar | Hacker News Reader

The only reason why I am not using tor right now is because of it's barrier of entry. I can probably figure it out, but currently the effort outweighs the return.

View on HN

Maybe I'm missing your sarcasm, you place no value in your digital privacy, or you're just completely computer illiterate. If you're capable of installing any app on your computer, you can run the tor browser. There is nothing more involved to it than downloading the tor browser bundle, running the setup file, and finally click on "Start Tor Browser.exe". My 90 year old grandmother could figure this out.

Wow your grandmother rocks.

Aside from all that, if you don't significantly modify your browsing habits, all you've now done is increase your interestingness to the NSA et al. and made your browser run slower and use more RAM.

From barrier to entry I mean the browser itself. Chrome is just more convenient and up to date. I am a web dev and if the latest html5 gig doesn't work it might be a dealbreaker for me. Now I understand I don't have to use onion browser as my primary browser, but I just don't use more than one browsers, at all. If it's chrome then I use chrome everywhere, phone/laptop, desktop, tablet. Consistency and up to date browser is currently more important to me than my privacy.

If I set my mom up with Tor, she would gain zero benefit. Given that exit nodes are snooped on, she would actually be worse off. Hell, I seem to remember the Tor Bundle itself saying that you need to do more than just install it if you want actual privacy benefits.

So, there is a bit more involved than running an executable.

The main reason for me is that I'm not 100% sure I won't be running an exit node when I turn it on. TOR's website isn't 100% clear on this.

You will 100% not be running an exit node just by installing the Tor Browser Bundle.

That's what I always thought about tor as well, but today I downloaded and have been using this - and it was/is as simple as installing and using any other browser:

https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en

I'm probably still missing a few layers of security if I want to order a pound of purple kush or a hitman or something though (right?)

I ran into the problem of a big memory footprint and the tor browser running really slow (on my quite fast laptop with i7, ssd and 16 gb mem)

When I was living in China, I used Tor daily to circumvent the great firewall. Back when the Tor bundle was using Firefox < 15, it has some bad memory leaks, but Mozilla has done a great job of fixing those. Chrome has turned into the memory hog. Chrome 2x memory usage has gotten so bad, I’m actually thinking about finding an old full install of a 0x or 1x for my laptop.

As far as it being slow to load sites, there will always be a high latency when using Tor. It’s the nature of onion routing. If Tor becomes more popular, I’m hoping there will be a way to donate to high bandwidth exit nodes to keep the network performance up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com