Tor Named One of the Year's Best Products 160
Iorek writes "PC World lauds Tor, an anonymous Internet communication system, as better than its paid competitors, and one of the best 100 products of 2005. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is supporting Tor development, has a press release as well."
tor blacklists :-( (Score:4, Insightful)
Even freenode has banned known tor connections. But that's what happens when you give 12 and 13 year old uber el3et linux hax0rs more power than they deserve.
Publicity a good thing or not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many reasons. Yes, it can be abused, just as a stick or a rock can be abused.
KOA
Giant Missile Defense Radar Sails [blogspot.com]
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get why so many people put letters in envelopes, what have they got to hide?
Why not write on the back of postcards so everybody can make sure they're not hiding illegal words..
It's a slippery slope. Encryption is useful.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a simple fact that People like privacy and place a non zero value on it. The phrase "what are you trying to hide" is the last refuge of the voyeur.
Insightful? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been wondering why the hell the network has been getting slower and slower and slower over the last weeks. I guess now I know.
Why is an anonymous network needed? Well for one thing it's not anonymous regarding the type of uses the critics like to trot out i.e kiddie porn and cracking, since a good many of the connection nodes originate in the US or Germany, two of the most monitored countries in the world. Your connection can go through a hundred drops after that it won't matter at all if you make that first hit straight to MIT or some
What it IS useful for (that is before it became so terribly overloaded every click ends up taking thirty seconds or more to respond) is surfing without worrying about your local "community standards" enforced ISP looking over your shoulder or the bazillions of admonkies being able to snoop. Tor is commonly packaged with privoxy, the two together make moving about the net a lot nicer (even slashdot).
Re:Publicity a good thing or not? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you only want freedom for people who agree with you, you're no better fundamentaly than the most oppresive of rulers. If you had the power to remove all kiddie porn from tor/freenet/$PRODUCT_X, would you? What if a christian fundamentalist had the same power to remove all talk of homosexuality? (a sins a sin..) Bush removing all info about the cipro(anthax antidote) a month prior to the whitehouse being anthraxed?
You either have free speech or you don't, anything less than entire freedom(especially for those of controversial subjects) is as worthless as not having any at all.
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the same with any other internet service - give it a few days, and watch the abuse roll on in. Web, Email, Chat, they can ALL be used for great things but the perpensity for abuse lurks just around the corner, and Tor isn't an exception to this.
If they allowed 100% of the Tor connections, the comments would be flooded with more ascii goatse pics, GNAA Postings, tubgirl links, and all kinds of wonderful trollish crap. It already is bad to a certain degree, and that's with a publicly moderated rating system and IP filtering already in place.
I'm all for internet anonymity and free speech, but there are very few reasons why someone would need to visit the slashdot comments section with a proxy.
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you still convinced that a network of potential "illegal" uses is such a bad thing?
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what the moderation system is designed in part to deal with. (Of course, with the addition of friends and freaks, and score modifiers for them, it's turned into more of a way of ensuring that your world view is never disturbed by reading things you don't agree with, but I digress...)
There's also nothing stopping the editors from deleting such crap. The ASCII pics and GNAA posts are easily seen at a glance, and it'd be trivial to produce a private interface that had a "delete this shite" button against each comment (or checkbox and single "Delete the shite" button, or whatever)
I'm all for internet anonymity and free speech, but there are very few reasons why someone would need to visit the slashdot comments section with a proxy.
Corporate whistle blowers, people in countries with oppresive regimes commenting on stories about some aspect of that regime (eg net censorship in China), people discussing first-hand experience of illegal activities, etc. No, it doesn't happen very often, but when it does it could potentially lead to very interesting comments.
All of that is beside the point, however. It most certainly does seem rather odd that the Slashdot editors praise Tor while simultaneously seeking to prevent access to the site with it. It's effectively saying "Yes, annonymous internet access is necessary and good, but not to *my* site!"
So, what, other sites should allow it, but not
Re:How about... (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, the ``Anonymous Coward'' option is only anonymous when you draw the system line around the forum; you aren't really anonymous. This is fine for having a technical discussion where people add their own experiences, but not good if you're talking about the accuracy of your homemade rifle if you live in a country that restricts one class of people or another from firearm possession.
Slashdot is whatever its owners want it to be, but if Slashdot bans anonymous posts and Tor routed networks, then some other Internet forum will become The Important Place on the Internet.
And as for Lynx users, the captcha thing could be changed into some sort of natural language equation, sort of like the email address obfustication Slashdot has.
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:2, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with censorship on a private site. Complaints about censorship apply to governments and other authorities stopping people exchanging certain information, i.e. passing laws banning obscene material. That's completely different from say a shop refusing to sell porn magazines. Slashdot has no obligation to post anyone's comments at all, but that doesn't mean that government censorship is acceptable.
This discussion also begs the question of the value of dissidents using anonymous Slashdot postings to get their message out. Is anything really changed by some Chinaman bitching about being opressed? If he posts it anonymously, no-one will read it because no-one is reading Anonymous Coward comments because they're 99% crapfloods. The irony of this is, if you want dissidents to be able to provide information anonymously, there needs to be a system to filter out the crapfloods and trolls. Maybe if the lameness-filter and moderation systems were less broken and corrupt, no IPs would need to be banned. But that would require both better programming from the site administrators, and more maturity and intelligence from the moderators. Are either likely?
Re:How about... (Score:5, Insightful)
No - it should leave the ability to post anonymously, but only if you are logged in to an actual account.
Slashcode is not designed for anonyminity (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the same with any other internet service - give it a few days, and watch the abuse roll on in. Web, Email, Chat, they can ALL be used for great things but the perpensity for abuse lurks just around the corner, and Tor isn't an exception to this.
No, it's because Slashcode lacks support for anonymous use. Until someone adds said support, Slashdot will not be anonymously usable.
If everyone created an account, no problem.
The thing is that Slashdot's codebase uses blacklisting as part of its functionality (it's how they keep abusers from flooding the board). Blacklisting does not work in a pure anonymous environment (that allows abuse if many entities collaborate to abuse the system, which is the case for most systems) without "expensive IDs" (the use of some resource which one cannot produce en-masse to identify onesself). Slashcode treats IP addresses as "expensive IDs", intending that those wanting to abuse the board have a limited set of IP addresses available to them, and those become blacklisted. Tor extends the availability of Tor-enabled IPs (expensive IDs) to anyone who wants. Slashcode cannot understand this. To make Slashcode work in an anonymous environment, support for expensive IDs that work in an anonymous environment must be added. There are many mechanisms for doing expensive IDs.
Slashcode currently uses both IPs (they can get banned) and accounts (they can get banned as well, and it takes a while to work up a high-post, low UIN account) as expensive IDs. IPs cannot be used in an anonymous environment. Accounts could, but probably must be boostrapped in a non-anonymous environment. That is, it would be possible for Slashdot to allow only registered users to use Slashdot from Tor systems (I could even register my IP as one that only allows registered use), but to prevent someone from mass-creating accounts, these accounts would have to be bootstrapped from a non-anonymous environment -- for example, perhaps an IP could only create an account a week, but once created, users could use their accounts on Tor systems.
Another popular expensive ID that saw some interest during the antispam discussion days is solved problems that require many CPU cycles. Generate a hard mathematical problem, to an anonymous user and the person has to burn 5 CPU-minutes of cycles solving a problem in order to post. They'll have a hard time flooding the board.
Another popular expensive ID is human time -- hence the OCRable letters that low-karma accounts and ACs have been seeing recently.
Another expensive ID is transitive trust -- allow accounts that have "trusted" accounts marking those accounts as, in turn, "trusted" (something like the friends system, but should not use the friend marking, which means something different) to use the board anonymously. If those accounts abuse the board, the abusing account loses his trust and the account that endorsed him loses some trust, transitively back to the source. This isn't *fully* anonymous (since the truster has to have some relationship with the trustee, even if it's nothing more than reading a Slashdot post made in non-anonymous mode).
Any other mechanism that uses expensive IDs that can function in an anonymous environment will also work.
I'm going to see whether or not open source solves this one. The Slashcode codebase is there, free, and open, and any number of people with crypto and security design experience read this board and presumably want to use Tor.
I don't really care much about using Slashdot anonymously, so I'm not going to do it. I'll probably take advantage of it if someone else adds support to Slashcode for working in an anonymous environment, though.