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."
Such hypocrisy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Publicity a good thing or not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Tor Router App? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:2, Interesting)
The editors have gone beyond a simple lack of faith in the moderation system, they are actively undermining it with broad account* and IP bans. For a website that makes such noise about being anti-censorship these are pretty funny actions.
*fun fact: if you log out and request the password for an account named "sllort", you will never post to slashdot again with that IP. Ever. Is this the same slashdot that has an entire section called "Your Rights Online"?
Onion routers are by no means new but Tor is (Score:5, Interesting)
And the problem with onion routing is that it is neither high-bandwidth or low-latency - just anonymous. Sharing files over Tor is a blatant misuse - but tracker comm over it is perfectly valid (Azureus already has a plugin - though I like dht better).
Interestingly, I2P [i2p.net] calls them Garlic routers [i2p.net] (the pun is not lost on some of us).Re:Publicity a good thing or not? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Such hypocrisy. (Score:2, Interesting)
So why not just give out mod points more often to moderators with a good track record?
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)
"Community standards" had nothing to do with it; the standards were set by a fairly small group of lunatics who happened to have a lot of guns. The same can be said of places like North Korea, Iraq, Sudan, and (dare I say it) perhaps even the United States. The FCC, backed by the federal government, which happens to have a lot more firepower than you or I, decides what is or isn't OK on television. As in several other above-listed states, the relatively small group with the superior firepower are the ones who set the rules, communities be damned.
Community standards are hogwash, anyway. I live in the deep south, the Bible belt. I know people who are staunch conservatives, or republicans, or Bush-Frist voters, or whatever you want to call them. These are the guys who go to that annual rally (I forget what it's called) where they profess their faith to God and their wives, and denounce pornography and infidelity. Yet I run into these guys at the strip clubs, at the liquor stores, you name it. All of the "sins" they're supposedly dead-set against, they more often than not participate in themselves.
Your average Bible-belter will vote against gambling, but then you'll find him in the casinos in Tunica or Biloxi. He'll vote against a state lottery, but darned if you don't run into him buying Powerball tickets at the gas station. He'll write to the FCC complaining about Janet Jackson, but as you drive past the adult bookstore, you see his car parked outside. He set the so-called "community standards" when he voted, but he doesn't even follow them himself. That's your average "community standards" progenitor.
Look no further than the Parents' Television Council for evidence of this. The PTC - which as you may recall from prior articles here is responsible for some 98% of all complaints to the FCC - proudly hosts on their own website the offensive clips from television shows they complain about. Even (gasp) children can surf by and find the stuff that's so offensive, they don't want their children to see it. How's that for irony?
For several months they hosted a video clip at http://www.parentstv.org/PTC/clips/WithoutaTrace_
Earth to Parents Television Council, your website is fully accessible to any child who has internet access, why are you hosting "extremely graphic and sexually explicit" content there? Fucking hypocrites.
A human being who has tasted freedom, who knows about life without oppression, who understands the value of the right to read and speak freely, and who hates seeing women all covered up.
Re:There is no privacy online (Score:2, Interesting)
Tor lets me surf those websites and find out what is going on in the world, and find out the things the PRC government doesn't want its citizens knowing about.
In short, it is my window on the world.
Same here. (Score:4, Interesting)
I was banned within hours of settiing up Tor on my host.
And Firefox is THE product of the year (Score:4, Interesting)
Tor is ok, but (Score:3, Interesting)
http://anonycat.com/ [anonycat.com]
it's open source, so you can download and run it from your own computer if you want, but you can also just surfy anonymously from the main page.
it's pretty good for viewing slashdot, too, which you can't do with Tor.
Good article - tor server count will soar (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, a US letter currently doesn't have to have a return address, much less a validated one. And a public mailbox in a big US city is pretty darn anonymizing. After all, they still haven't caught the folks who sent anthrax-filled letters to US government officials---and I'm guessing it's not for want of trying.
Re:How about... (Score:1, Interesting)
Some people are Republicans because their beliefs closely match the original tenets of the Republican party (states' rights, small government, lower taxes, more privitization, etc). Some people are Democrats because they truly want a stronger federal government, more social programs paid for by everybody's tax dollars (nevermind that implementing most of that stuff leads to a combination of some nanny/police/Big Brother state with a completely intrusive government and community laws that don't reflect the community (having been designed either by majority vote over a very large area, leading to 20,000,000 city folks who don't know anything about where their food comes from deciding that an empty 100 acres (a field) could be better used as 400 houses (because we can just buy more food in the global economy!)).[1]
Anyway, the point: a lot of people follow their views, a lot of people watch and vote the way they think is best for themselves/everybody else, but a lot of people either don't really care or care blindly. The ones that care blindly tend to be Democrats, and because of positions they hold in the entertainment industry, they try to make the Democratic party ``popular'' (like a high school quarterback) to try to reign in the apathetic folks. Think along the lines of the time Rosie O'Donnell bushwhacked Tom Selleck on her show. She used a media outlet to attempt (and it truly was an attempt. She doesn't know what she's talking about and doesn't even live by what she was moaning about) to ridicule a group of people.[2] That's what stunts like Air America are about. They aren't trying to solve any problems; they're trying to raise the popularity of their party.
Republicans aren't experiencing popularity now, they're experiencing majority. There aren't any Republicans dressing up like birth control pill containers or dildoes[3] (I looked it up in the dictionary: ``plural dildos also dildoes.'' Way to be vague there. I chose the form that most reminds me of deer hunting) in the streets to sell their beliefs. Of course, there are blind Republicans, too, but don't anybody believe for a second that all of the Republicans or all of the blind Republicans vote that way because of stupidity. The cracks on the Internet about Christianity and what belongs in what class in what school is just more of the same popularity contest. At the end of the day most people do what they think is right, but more acid is directed at Republicans than Republicans spout.
--
[1] I don't really like farm subsidies, but with the way land is being gobbled up here in the USA we're eventually going to have to have some serious thoughts about food production. I greatly prefer subsidies to government owned-by-eminent-domain growing fields, though. If the farmers can't afford to live (and most can't. The reason we raise chickens and cows by attrition with hormones and such is because we can't compete on price otherwise. There's no money in farming at any level unless you both already own the land and play a percentage game with your crops and herds. It's cheaper to shoot a lame cow than it is to heal it at that level.)
[2] Rosie O'Donnell jumped Tom Selleck about being a member of the NRA. She denounced firearms as thoroughly as she could, which is not at all due to lack of knowledge of the subject. If you strip emotions out of it then there really isn't a serious argument. It's hilarious to hear the same people denounce guns as killing machines and in the next breath plea to ``ignorant rubes'' to drop emotion from matters relating to religion. For the record, I didn't bother looking up either of the characters' names, so if they're misspelled, boohoo.
[3] I've seen people dressed up as birth control pills on the news recently (although I don't rememb