BBC News Launches 'Dark Web' Tor Mirror (bbc.com) 41
sandbagger writes: The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship. Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programs. Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually the BBC is funded through the TV license paid by the UK people and receives no money from the government.
Re: The poacher is the best forester (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
The government still points the gun and demands money. Not sure why making you give it directly to someone else is any different.
Different gun (Score:3)
In the case of TV in countries which have public broadcast TV/Radio (UK, Switzerland, Japan, etc.), it's an entirely different entity that points the gun and demands money.
The point being that the government can't then point their gun and say "do not pay the TV, we're unhappy with them, they weren't polite when speaking about us": the government doesn't have a say in budget allocation for TV/Radio, it's an entirely different and independent structure that does the gun pointing and money demanding.
Re: (Score:2)
Ummm, that's government. I assume it's a law permitting some organization to extract money from you and they aren't just making that power up themselves, because that's called theft and is illegal.
Proof: What if you refuse to pay? Who comes after you for, presumably, violating a law? If private TV police, and you resist them, who then comes?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In some countries, yes. (Score:3)
So the people pay the BBC directly?
In some country like Switzerland with SSR TV/Radio broadcasts (and I strongly guess that's the same situation in UK with BBC, and propably in Japan with NHK), yes the people pay the TV broadcast company directly, with no government involved at any stage.
It's a complete tax-like system which is entirely parallel to your normal taxes.
The rationales behind this is to keep the TV and radio (i.e.: media that would be needing at some point to report about the government and and criticize it) as much independent a
Re: (Score:3)
a) not true b) running a Tor hidden site does not help you compromise Tor users unless they do something really stupid. Some minimal insight required to see that though.
Re:The poacher is the best forester (Score:5, Insightful)
It's also well worth noting that the news arm of the BBC runs almost autonomously, with very little interference from the government funded parent corporation. This helps keep the news arm of the organisation neutral and politically unbiased. Sure, it's indirectly funded by the british government, but for that exact reason, it's pretty neutral compared to other organisations. It might not be perfect, but it's a lot better than most independent news networks, as they don't feel threatened about speaking up about politically sensitive issues.
Many other news corporations do not claim neutrality like the BBC, and for good reason. Most other organisations are very much politically biased. RT is directly funded and controlled by the russians/Putin. News Corp (Rupert Murdoch, company, Fox, Sky, etc) is very much politically biased in the countries they operate in, and they don't hide it. Same goes for CNN, ABC etc. They're may be non-english news networks that are more neutral than the BBC, but i am not aware of any.
Re:The poacher is the best forester (Score:4, Informative)
They are not safe from their own personal biases. More and more these people see themselves as kind of guardians of society against evils both real and imaginary. They know better. They are our betters.
What you say was almost true 20 years ago. Not anymore. Keep in mind that I have religiously followed them in the last 20 years. Religiously. All the channels, including the domestic BBC 1, 2, 3 and 4. Dig back in my history and you'd find a post where I say "stream me the domestic channels and I would pay the license as a Brit; that is how much I respected them".
However, slowly but surely it turned to shit. For me it started when I realized their absolute distorted presentation of Slavs in general and my native society in particular. I don't care if they do it because "Russia bad" (a sentiment that I support); it's wrong and highly offensive. It only pours oil into the fire and antagonizes people further. Then the people who run Hard Talk turned into full blown PC/SJW idiots. I could not believe my eyes and ears! I used to swear in these people objectivism. The most successful show ever was destroyed because the presenters did not follow to the letter the PC narrative (oh, how happy they were that they could finally "get them").
And don't get me started on their web page.....in fact I have used that as a clear example of media bias and propaganda.
Do not listen to any mainstream media, period! Maybe this is a period of shakedown when the shit the media produces finally clogs the system to the point of collapse. Then we clear the mess and start anew.....I hope, I hope.
P.S> I checked the links you provided. Small potatoes....insignificant issues being contested while nobody talks about the elephant in the room. The usual diversion tactics.
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The BBC isn't government funded. It is funded via a licence fee and from its own revenues from things like exported programming.
The licence fee is legally mandated and the level is set by the government, which unfortunately does allow politics to creep in. However it has proven resistant to political influence because when the licence fee revenue is decreased the BBC makes sure that the core news content and journalism is unaffected.
Similar. (Score:2)
It's also well worth noting that the news arm of the BBC runs almost autonomously, with very little interference from the government funded parent corporation. This helps keep the news arm of the organisation neutral and politically unbiased. Sure, it's indirectly funded by the british government, but for that exact reason, it's pretty neutral compared to other organisations. It might not be perfect, but it's a lot better than most independent news networks, as they don't feel threatened about speaking up about politically sensitive issues.
Though they aren't as neutral as the BBC, the Swiss broadcasting network (SSR) is similarly independent for the exact same reason (They are also paid by a direct fee with no government involved).
I've heard NHK in Japan is simlarly funded.
Many other news corporations do not claim neutrality like the BBC, and for good reason. Most other organisations are very much politically biased. RT is directly funded and controlled by the russians/Putin. News Corp (Rupert Murdoch, company, Fox, Sky, etc) is very much pol
Re: (Score:1)
MI6 News Launches 'Dark Web' Tor Mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
BBC is indepent (Score:2)
BBC is among those broadcaster, that is directly funded by a license fee and is operating completely independent of the government.
(other random examples: Switzerland's SSR, Japan's NHK, etc.) (as opposed to France or Germany were the TV is also publicly funded by the government).
So if the government is unhappy with how the BBC collaborates, there isn't much they can't do. They can't threaten to cut some funding down, the BBC is independent.
So no, it's definitely not an MI6 honeypot. (at least not obviously
TOR is compromised (mostly) by default. (Score:1)
The NSA and other Five Eyes TLA agencies run many exit nodes. TOR itself has dodgy sources of funding / organisation (1). At a minimum, use Tails (2) on a USB drive on a laptop.
1. https://surveillancevalley.com... [surveillancevalley.com]
2. https://tails.boum.org/ [boum.org]
Re:TOR is compromised (mostly) by default. (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it too much to ask that people do a little research before spreading stupid conspiracy theories?
Re: (Score:3)
These days, sadly, yes.
The old term "close your ears" is becoming more and more relevant again as people literally don't want to listen to anything that compromises the perfect little bubble they live in. Thanks the the wonder of modern technology, such people are easily heard by others and interpreted as experts in their field by less knowledgeable.
Thank you for trying to fight the FUD a little.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. Most people fail at having more "insight" into these questions than some lose word association. Incidentally, Roger Dingledine is completely open about the funding (asked him at a conference about it) and he thinks that they did not understand what they were funding back then.
Re: (Score:2)
Keep up at the back!
There are a number [wikipedia.org] of well documented & tested attacks on the Tor network. The GP could perhaps be referring to the Bad Apple Attack [wikipedia.org]:
The "bad apple attack" exploits Tor's design and takes advantage of insecure application use to associate the simultaneous use of a secure application with the IP address of the Tor user in question. One method of attack depends on control of an exit node or hijacking tracker responses, while a secondary attack method is based in part on the statistical exploitation of distributed hash table tracking. According to the study:
The results presented in the bad apple attack research paper are based on an attack in the wild launched against the Tor network by the authors of the study. The attack targeted six exit nodes, lasted for twenty-three days, and revealed a total of 10,000 IP addresses of active Tor users.
Caveat (Score:2)
Past honeypot trials caught cleartext passwords being stored and used [sophos.com], presumably by the operators of the relevant exit nodes (although the passwords were visible on the whole path from the exit node to they honeypot).
Tor users should not:
p.s. Hidden services (like the new BBC site) do not use exit nodes.
Re: Caveat (Score:1)
Don't exit the TOR network at all. Even then, ensure your interface (browser) doesn't try. Blacklist all non .onion domains.
Tor is still the best available (Score:2)
The NSA and other Five Eyes TLA agencies run many exit nodes.
Yeah, and so what ?
Tor isn't your garden variety "VPN" which a single point of failure (see recent NordVPN hack allegations on /. )
Tor relies on a circuit with multiple hops, an entity would need to be in control of both the entry and the exit node and do timing attacks (or control every single hop) in order to be able to de-anonymize your traffic. Special care is taken by the devs to keep the probability of this as low as possible.
Also Tor is useful to protect US intelligence communications online, so *it
Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully they don't change their mind and shut it down like Facebook did.
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Avoiding censorship, huh? (Score:2)
I wonder if it will help me get around those banners stating "This content can not be accessed from your location (despite you being a tax-paying citizen of a Commonwealth country)" whenever I try to view any show on the Beeb's website.
Re: (Score:1)
I mean you're right but you're also a huge dickhead
Re: Avoiding censorship, huh? (Score:1)
how about improving security... (Score:1)
thats nice that you have tor... how about fixing problems like :
adding IPv6 to all the websites so that mobile/cell subscribers don't have to use a proxy and can connect directly (facebook see's about 50% IPv6 traffic)
signing your zone with DNSSEC so that people can verify that they are indeed visiting a authentic website and not redirected via MITM
Implementing a HSTS policy so that after that first use they don't get MITM the next thing after DNSSEC...
use X-Frame-Options X-Content-Type-Options X-XSS-Prote
browsers (Score:2)
All browsers need to support Tor .. and actually all websites need to get on it too eventually in the long term.
Deep, Dark, whatever brings in more clicks (Score:1)
Compare to facebookcorewwwi.onion (Score:2)
It looks correct to me:
- Deep web [wikipedia.org] is anything not on web search engines like DuckDuckGo and Google Search. This could be because of /robots.txt, sites with only a keyword search and no top-level directory, password requirements, etc.
- Dark web [wikipedia.org] is a website hosted as hidden service requiring I2P, Tor, or another proxy or VPN to access. For example, Facebook have their own hidden service on the Tor dark web [wikipedia.org].
Re: (Score:1)
Well, yeah.. but... (Score:2)
If I can't buy my cocaine there, what's the point?
Pointless. (Score:1)
So unless the "Dark Site" contains something too juicy for general public, this is an exercise at pointlessness.