Tor-Enabled Browser For the iPad, and Easy Tor Nodes on EC2 75
An anonymous reader writes "While there has been a port of Tor for jailbroken iOS devices for a long time, there was no way to use it if you did not want to lose your warranty. Now it looks like Apple has approved a Web browser for the iPad called Covert Browser, which includes a Tor client. If you look at the first screenshot on the author's page it looks like you can even select the Exit node. According to App Shopper it already hit place 64 in the iPad/Utilites category." And from another (of course) anonymous reader comes a link to CmdrTaco's take on another instance of Tor breaking into the world of "real users." As he notes, the Tor Cloud Project has posted simple instructions for installing EC2 Tor nodes using free-tier VMs (or paid nodes for roughly $30/month).
Re:Is Tor even viable anymore? (Score:5, Informative)
That's true for plaintext traffic, but if you use HTTPS with an anti-MITM plugin like Perspectives/Convergence, and assuming the government in question can't get free and easy access to the site's private key (big assumption, I know), then traffic sniffing isn't possible.
More importantly, it can make connections untraceable, and if you don't send any identifiable information through the connection, then it doesn't matter if the contents can be seen.
That said I think I2P is better both for darknet hosting and anonymization, it has a number of technical advantages over Tor.
Re:Many Tor nodes on one service - good idea? (Score:3, Informative)
There *is* real privacy concern if many Tor nodes move to one cloud provider, and particularly if the Tor nodes are the first and last hop of the chain. In fact, we have a project called "Cloud-based Onion Routing" (COR) that looks at this problem.
COR discusses some policy approaches to make deployment on *multiple* cloud providers safer, as well as introducing another layer of indirection that makes Tor/COR market-friendly: We can sell (or give away) access to this higher-performance COR network, while still protecting end-user anonymity.
http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/projects/cor/ [princeton.edu]
The nice thing is that our implementation mostly just uses the local tor controller to enforce access to the tor proxy based on the presence of anonymity-preserving tokens sent during connection setup, while "Anonymity Service Providers" running Tor nodes on cloud providers (EC2, Rackspace, etc.) is just starting a VM and running a node.