jerheinze

So you think using Tor is worse than not using Tor and connecting to everything plaintext?

> Pay for your VPN with privacy coins or run your own VPN.

That doesn't matter since you're still connected to them with your IP address, plus there's the additional problem of browser fingerprinting which alone may leak enough information to de-anonymize you and let us not even mention the lack of first-party isolation. Running your own VPN is even worse since it basically links you to all of the traffic.

> VPNs can be purchased with BTC.

That doesn't matter since you're still connected to them with your IP address, plus there's the additional problem of browser fingerprinting which alone may leak enough information to de-anonymize you and let us not even mention the lack of first-party isolation.

> I personally believe that Tor is compromised. I have been saying this for several years. The amount of bandwidth it consumes, and the reliance on honest entrance and exit nodes

You obviously never bothered to look at who runs relays: https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html Plus Tor's threat model already assumes that some nodes are compromised: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#adver... And as others pointed out, the oft-stated "using Tor is better than not" applies.

> Remote self-destructible VM for browsing with Firefox in incognito mode (only sites you NEED to, that REQUIRE JS), through multiple VPNs over multiple proxies.

I hope you're just joking since layering up multiple VPNs doesn't provide any privacy by design. The best way is to use disposable Whonix VMs in Qubes OS.

> they promised Tor integration like 4-5 years ago and all they did is setup 3 middle-nodes.

They never promised any Tor integration for the near future, see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17205441 and the first comment. Brave can do Tor integration because its user bases is much smaller than Mozilla's (scaling the Tor network to support the load from all FF users still requires much work).

The patch for that has been already uplifted to Firefox and is behind the pref "privacy.resistFingerprinting": https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=967895

By the way it's spelled "Tor" ;)

Flipping "privacy.resistFingerprinting" in about:config to true should be sufficient in recent versions (also realize that this will change your default UTC prefs, some timing prefs, default window size, and a bunch of other stuff ...etc).

Minimize != Disable.

You can't disable ME.

> Side note, but GlobaLeaks requires JavaScript. This is an issue if you fear someone might try to exploit your browser.

JS is not the only surface attack. Also what's the point of targeting anyone who goes into *.onion if it risks burning up your high-price exploit?

Read the "Strategies for Defense: Randomization versus Uniformity" part.

A VPN does not offer privacy-by-design, it's at best a privacy-by-policy product.

> My only complaint is that if you have canvas fingerprint randomization turned on it still counts as unique.

It's not a good idea to randomize it, see the Tor Browser design document for more details https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...

> Once you take IP address and city out of the equation browser fingerprinting becomes much harder

That's not true, see all the values that can be used to fingerprint a browser: https://fpcentral.tbb.torproject.org/fp https://browserprint.info https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/#finge...

Well with https://www.facebookcorewwwi.onion/ Facebook won't even know your IP and hence location (though you're not anonymous to them).

As I said earlier in another comment: In that setup your browser fingerprint alone is enough to uniquely identify you, and it doesn't protect you from tracking by the first-party domains themselves.

For speed, yes, that's the cost of having your traffic go through a 3 relay circuit, but Tor is much faster now than it used to be.

In that setup your browser fingerprint alone is enough to uniquely identify you, and it doesn't protect you from tracking by the first-party domains themselves. See as well: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

> Site-specific or filter-based addons such as AdBlock Plus, Request Policy, Ghostery, Priv3, and Sharemenot are to be avoided. We believe that these addons do not add any real privacy to a proper implementation of the above privacy requirements, and that development efforts should be focused on general solutions that prevent tracking by all third parties, rather than a list of specific URLs or hosts.

> Implementing filter-based blocking directly into the browser, such as done with Firefox' Tracking Protection, does not alleviate the concerns mentioned in the previous paragraph. There is still just a list containing specific URLs and hosts which, in this case, are assembled by Disconnect and adapted by Mozilla.

> Trying to resort to filter methods based on machine learning does not solve the problem either: they don't provide a general solution to the tracking problem as they are working probabilistically. Even with a precision rate at 99% and a false positive rate at 0.1% trackers would be missed and sites would be wrongly blocked.

> Filter-based solutions in general can also introduce strange breakage and cause usability nightmares. For instance, there is a trend to observe that websites start detecting filer extensions and block access to content on them. Coping with this fallout easily leads to just whitelisting the affected domains, hoping that this helps, defeating the purpose of the filter in the first place. Filters will also fail to do their job if an adversary simply registers a new domain or creates a new URL path. Worse still, the unique filter sets that each user creates or installs will provide a wealth of fingerprinting targets.

Let's say you set this up with the Tor Browser, all your DNS resolutions are done using this onion, then they're all linkable--whereas with the default they're unlinkable since two different circuits were used for different first-party domains. That's the point.

> So in the Tor browser, DNS resolution for non-onion addresses creates a new circuit each time?

You can try it for yourself, open a tab in the Tor Browser with foo1.com, look at the circuit in the Torbutton. Then open another tab with foo2.com, look at the circuit and compare it with the earlier one.

Thanks for that, don't forget to change it to conform with the upcoming Tor Browser for Android and ESR60-based alpha releases.

As I said in the earlier duplicate post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17238365

> That makes privacy worse than the default setup with Tor since there's no stream isolation. With the standard Tor Browser you get a different circuit for each first-party domain, that's not something you'd have with this.

That makes privacy worse than the default setup with Tor since there's no stream isolation. With the standard Tor Browser you get a different circuit for each first-party domain, that's not something you'd have with this.

> Installing additional extensions is discouraged; but in my experience Decentraleyes makes latency somewhat less disturbing, CAPTCHAs appear less often; and uBlock Origin is essential [-]. > > [-] shipping with every available filter list enabled and cached may be a good enough default

See https://bugs.torproject.org/22089 and https://bugs.torproject.org/17569

I2P is more concerned with inward traffic rather than clearnet 'exit' traffic which is the main thing that Mozilla wants in a super private mode.

Most likely a botnet.

One can also run pre-bridges for the snowflake transport by just having some JS code run in a browser's tab (requires WebRTC to be enabled): https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake

It's OK now, they no longer show a captcha on most websites behind Cloudflare.