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Comment by rcamera | Hacker News Reader

Tor Devs haven't made any announcement yet, there is, however, a discussion about it on the mailing list:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...

If you use Tor, I would follow the suggestion by another member of the mailing list [1], simply add to your torrc file:

  ExcludeNodes US
  StrictNodes 1

That will disallow using any US nodes, which works since all of LizardNSA's nodes are currently in the US.

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...

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UPDATE: "But even though they are running thousands of new relays, their relays currently make up less than 1% of the Tor network by capacity. We are working now to remove these relays from the network before they become a threat, and we don't expect any anonymity or performance effects based on what we've seen so far." So hopefully this gets nipped in the trollish bud before anonymity is affected."

http://gizmodo.com/hackers-who-shut-down-psn-and-xbox-live-n...

What was the maximum capacity over the entire attack?

Even if you held majority for just an hour, it seems you could still build a useful database of identities and their usage. I was trying to imagine how much just an hour Tor snapshot might be worth to somebody.

Maybe? Or no?

According to EFF analyst @evacide, they had about 3,000 nodes or 0.27% of the network. https://twitter.com/evacide/status/548640012925812736

No, for two reasons. 1) new relays are capped at a low bandwidth for the first few days and 2) relays cannot become guard nodes (and therefore cannot identify real users' IPs) until they have been stable for at least 8 days

see: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/lifecycle-of-a-new-relay

Supposed response from "lizards@riseup.net":

> Why? I assure you, our exits are just fine. What's with people responding so negatively to us donating 360Gbit/s of exit BW?

EDIT: From @lizardmafia:

> To clarify, we are no longer attacking PSN or Xbox. We are testing our new Tor 0day.

> Only hackers, miscreants and pedophiles use Tor.

There is a clear explanation in the same thread as to why LizardNSA's actions of adding bandwidth to the network isn't good, and in fact, potentially dangerous (not very dangerous at this moment of writing):

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2014-Decembe...

"Only hackers, miscreants and pedophiles use Tor."

Oh please. They're trying to take the moral high ground to justify their behaviour.

What is trolling?

An excuse for being an asshole.... but real trolling is done with finesse, intelligence, humour and a pinch of salted evil.

Only hackers, miscreants and pedophiles use Tor.

Amateurs.

The kind of person whose sense of moral outrage gets activated by such nonsense bullshit doesn't know what the word "miscreant" means, and by not mentioning "terrorists" they're just confusing their target audience. If you don't say "terrorist", how are we supposed to know you're the good guys?

"> Only hackers, miscreants and pedophiles use Tor." you must be a full blown moron. Tor is used by journalists, bloggers, gov employees, chinese dissidents and all sorts of ppl in peril. go shoot yourself

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