Group Thinks Anonymity Should Be Baked Into the Internet Itself Using Tor 123
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "David Talbot writes at MIT Technology review that engineers on the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an informal organization of engineers that changes Internet code and operates by rough consensus, have asked the architects of Tor to consider turning the technology into an Internet standard. If widely adopted, such a standard would make it easy to include the technology in consumer and business products ranging from routers to apps and would allow far more people to browse the Web without being identified by anyone who might be spying on Internet traffic. The IETF is already working to make encryption standard in all web traffic. Stephen Farrell believes that forging Tor into a standard that interoperates with other parts of the Internet could be better than leaving Tor as a separate tool that requires people to take special action to implement. 'I think there are benefits that might flow in both directions,' says Farrell. 'I think other IETF participants could learn useful things about protocol design from the Tor people, who've faced interesting challenges that aren't often seen in practice. And the Tor people might well get interest and involvement from IETF folks who've got a lot of experience with large-scale systems.' Andrew Lewman, executive director of Tor, says the group is considering it. 'We're basically at the stage of 'Do we even want to go on a date together?' It's not clear we are going to do it, but it's worth exploring to see what is involved. It adds legitimacy, it adds validation of all the research we've done.'"
interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
TOR? Or I2P? Or Freenet? Or something else? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all for anonymous communication with encryption though. I hate what corporations and governments are doing to the internet. I do believe internet is the most important human discovery since fire, and its freedoms need to be preserved...
--Coder
Re:interesting (Score:4, Insightful)
Many if not most existing standards have turned out to be fairly mediocre from a security point of view, think of cell phone and wireless encryption for example. There is also some evidence from the Snowden leak that standards procedures and committees have been weakened by members acting overtly or secretly on behalf of government agencies. So they should be really cautious about such offers.
And why re-invent the wheel and make something fro scratch? Tor is working well, even too well in the eye of some people ...
Re:This is people mistaking "want" with "will" (Score:4, Insightful)
void between chair and keyboard (Score:3, Insightful)
*OMG* no! Tor does nothing if you want to spill your personal guts all over the internet. Also cookies and other nefarious tracking technologies work ...
wonderfully right through tor. tor doesn't block you if you want to scream your name and credit card number and whatnot to the internet
can we just have websites work without javascript and FLASH?!
Re:interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Why the hell would you trust Tor? (Score:0, Insightful)
Tor was INVENTED by the DoD. Do you think the NSA would allow it to exist if they have not compromised it? Look at a map of Tor servers - there is a HUGE cluster in the Virginia area.
Tor is a honeypot.
Re:True or False (Score:5, Insightful)
True,
Group think is the Opposite of Synergy.
Well it is the opposite outcome.
Unlike most people I actually know what Synergy means, and see how it is greatly misused.
Synergy is the process where a group of people working on a problem come up with a solution which is greater then the sum of what any individual could make.
Group Think is where the a group of people working on a problem come up with a solution which is less then the sum of what any individual could make.
Obtaining Synergy in an environment is very hard to achieve, because you need to make sure you don't have strong personalities trying pushing bad ideas thew their own force of will, or intimating position. People getting tired out from the process and settling on lesser ideas, reserved personalities not giving their ideas, and a slew of other things going on as well.
Group think is what usually comes out of these events, where the strongly supported stupid idea is forced down the thought, with issues not properly evaluated, and blank assumptions made.
Re:interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
They are disadvantage on almost every thing out there.
You can pine on the disadvantages, or you can rate them and see how to fix them, without cutting into an other advantage, or increasing an other disadvantage.
Normally if a protocol is Fast, it is unsecured. if it is Secure, it is slow. If it is complex and full featured, there are a lot of failures in implementation, if it is solid, there is a lot less features.
Life is full of tradeoffs, Stop pining on the road you didn't take, and work on the road you took to make it better.
Re:There comes a time when splits are required. (Score:4, Insightful)
How feasible would it be to split the internet right down the middle but share the same lines?
So on one half you could keep the wild wild west net and on the other all the cry babies and censor-happy types can have their walled wide web.
Then just onion-up the wild wild west side.
This wouldn't work because you're forgetting the censor-happy people's mentality: they aren't trying to censor the internet so that they can't get to certain material, they are trying to censor it so that _you_ can't get to certain material because the _idea_ of you looking at certain stuff in private offends them. So this kind of split couldn't happen because the censor-happy people still don't want to allow you to get to the "wild wild west" net.
Wide-scale censoring is all about "I find what you do in private to be offensive so you should be locked up for offending me!" and almost never to do with "I find this content offensive so don't want to see it myself". Much the same way as various activities happening between consenting adults in private are illegal - this isn't about protecting anyone from anything other than offense caused by their own narrow-mindedness.
Note, I do think there is a place for local-scale censorship, such as preventing kids/teachers at school from accidentally stumbling across stuff they shouldn't. However, where kids are *actively* trying to get at porn, et-al, censorship is never going to work and it is far better to spot kids doing this so someone can have a talk with them. That's not to say that I necessarilly think kids looking at porn is a bad thing (indeed, it's completely normal), but talking to them about it to put it into context is probably a good plan.
I hope Tor runs away as fast as it can (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Isn't Tor compromised? (Score:2, Insightful)
It would also defeat the main purpose of Tor, which is to access the Web anoynmously.
If you want to build a separate anonymous network on the top the Internet, why would you use Tor and not technology that has been developed with that purpose in mind such as I2P, Freenet or Gnunet?
Re:interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Where was all this concern about the debt when Reagan and Bush W. were cutting taxes, emptying the Social Security trust fund, and spending madly on military and spy agencies? When Reagan took office, the debt was 3 trillion. When Bush took office, it was 6 trillion. Clinton actually paid the debt down a half trillion in his final year: Bush immediately declared the surplus the people's money and gave the surplus back - then raised spending until he left the country another extra six 6 trillion in debt, with obligations to pay for wars and refund the money stolen from the SS trust fund since 1984. Republicans cut taxes and raise spending, run up the debt, have a rich man's party, then step back and let Democrats take all the blame and make the spending cuts and tax increases to try to repair the damage. This has been a thirty+ year tax-cut-based robbery. And always, always an excuse to cut aid to the poor, never the rich.