Tor is not just for anonymity (2022)

https://blog.pastly.net/posts/2022-11-09-tor-is-not-just-for-anonymity/

by Fred34 • 3 years ago

204 145 3 years ago

blog.pastly.net

The problem with TOR is CloudFlare and the likes. Many exit nodes are blocked, so you cannot reasonably get to a heap of sites. If I can't get to sites because they're blocked, then I'm not really on the internet.

Not TOR's fault, but it is something holding it back. Sadly.

Fred342• 3 years ago

Yea I mostly use LibreWolf now as Tor is too slow and too many services block it and just use it to read (many news sites have tor addresses now). But another reason to support the project is that a lot of the anti-fingerprinting innovations developed by the Tor project eventually makes their way to more usable browsers. The Tor project gets a large bit of funding to find and patch privacy holes in their Firefox-based browser ― the solutions they come up with can often be implemented in other Firefox browsers.

tinytuna• 3 years ago

You should give a look at Mullvad Browser, it has been developed in collaboration with the tor project and you have no latency issues

LeoPanthera• 3 years ago

Tor's ability to use exit nodes is much less interesting to me than Tor-hosted Onion sites. I wish more sites also offered an onion.

sdsd• 3 years ago

Agree. Recently, my favorite childhood imageboard (711chan.net) came back online, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they offer the site via Tor, including using the Onion-Location header to make the browser aware of this fact.

Interestingly, they allow Tor users to post. It's an anonymous imageboard with no CAPTCHA, so I'm not sure how they intend to address spam this way.

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

Yes, but this article was very meticulous about only referring to the experience of using onion services. Native Tor. Kind of imagining a ubiquitous onion router over TLS and DNS, which is a bit disingenuous but accurate on the technical front.

40 years ago there were competing protocols to DNS, its just not common to think of it that way anymore.

ronnier• 3 years ago

Yeah I block tor for account registrations for one of the worlds largest social media apps. It’s nearly all abuse. Though I let tor access if you already have an account.

schoen• 3 years ago

The Tor developers were eager a few years ago to talk with people who were blocking Tor to see if they could help find alternatives. I realize you've probably thought about this a lot already, but have you ever discussed it with them? Alternatively, do you think you could explain more about the kinds of abuse that are typical when people sign up over Tor?

I realize that might come across as naive, because it's not as though they somehow know more about your abuse problems than you do, and it's also unlikely that they know something obscure about Tor that would turn out to be surprising and important for you. But they're certainly motivated to see if they can help people think of alternatives.

(I'm not actively involved with Tor right now, but I've been pretty close to the project in the past.)

quickthrower22• 3 years ago

Can you tor to a vpn then that gives you some more choice over origin server and IP

pinkcan3• 3 years ago

what is tor adding to that setup?

chaxor• 3 years ago

Is Cloudfare not a large exit node for Tor?

Perhaps I don't know how it works, but I would just imagine they would be, since Tor seems like it's mostly geared towards increasing availability of internet resources, and that aligns with Cloudfare.

vbezhenar4• 3 years ago

Cloudflare does not enforce tor blocking. Webmasters who use Cloudflare services, are making a choice to block tor. Cloudflare is just a tool, like iptables.

mnd999• 3 years ago

Okta completely block it so it has to be disabled for anything work related to, which is kinda annoying.

goodpoint5• 3 years ago

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

chungy• 3 years ago

Sometimes Tor hidden services are just convenient if you're behind a NAT you can't control (be it corporate or carrier).

system33-2• 3 years ago

I think this is where most people’s minds would jump when reading the title. When it’s actually about Tor providing security in general, not just anonymity specifically.

It was written in response to someone claiming something like “Tor provides no benefit over TLS unless you want anonymity” and strives to demonstrate it provides non-anonymity security benefits beyond what TLS can do.

It discusses a very specific scenario because that’s what I was arguing about with someone. The title could’ve been better.

pinkcan3• 3 years ago

tailscale

got a mini at home serving as an exit node

set this up one time the it dep was being obtuse about fw rules, and locked us out of ssh, so we couldn't push to gh - amateur hour; add more shadow it

superkuh• 3 years ago

Just don't mistake tor onion service addresses for permanent things. The .onions are much less of a priority than the clear web "anonymous" proxy. If onion support gets in the way of clear web proxy security it will be removed. Any particular version of Onion addresses will simply cease to exist and stop working in the tor project's software every 10 years or so; completely wiping out the entire tor ecosystem and all links. It's happened before and it will happen again.

So yeah, .onion services are secure but they're also transient. Don't try to build a community that relies on .onion links continuing to work over years.

Fred342• 3 years ago

Or Tor will release another address system. I remember when the Tor team released their v3 onion address a few years back they killed access to the old v2 sites on the network by not making the new browser versions backwards compatible.

jtvjan• 3 years ago

It's not like support for v2 was removed immediately after v3 was released.

v2 and v3 coëxisted for over three years, giving 16 months advance warning of the deprecation, ending in a four month period where support was removed from the server but the client could still connect to it.

Operators had plenty of time to upgrade their services.

Vecr2• 3 years ago

Do you have any reason to think they would get rid of v3 any time soon? They should be able to upgrade the encryption (and some, but not all of their authentication) to post quantum without changing the addresses.

system33-2• 3 years ago

v2 were removed because they are insecure. Bad crypto and addresses were discoverable when they shouldn’t need to be (and scanners were always running and discovering them).

I don’t think there’s any reason to suspect v3 will be removed because it’s “in the way” of standard clear-web proxying. If they are removed, it’ll be because there’s an issue and a v4 is needed.

collsni• 3 years ago

I liked the CA MITM call out.. we just trust these organizations to not deploy wildcard malicious certificates.

Kinda messed up devices come preloaded with unchangeable trusted CAs

Guy knows his stuff, also works for dod.

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

we just trust these organizations to not deploy wildcard malicious certificates.

Don't we have transparency logs to check that now?

judge20202• 3 years ago

Yes, Chrome and Safari will not load a site if the cert is not in CT. https://no-sct.badssl.com/

AndyMcConachie2• 3 years ago

So now we trust them to log it. What's the difference?

SLWW2• 3 years ago

One very important thing that TOR provides is additional routes when international routing between ISPs is blocked/broken for whatever reason.

Several websites (that are legal, legitimate in nature) get censored by tier-1 ISPs (for whatever reason) however even though they are clearnet websites, you can still view them out of country, since with TOR you can keep refreshing your routes until you get access.

toastal3• 3 years ago

Good example: I needed to get voter information abroad in order to get a mail-in ballot, but the government website blocked all foreign origin connections.

Dah00n2• 3 years ago

How awful. Which country?

technological• 3 years ago

Just curious - Does VPN help in this case ? Or do you prefer Tor

smashed• 3 years ago

Tor exit nodes are also frequently blocked or severely scrutinized... I'm surprised it worked..

Maybe since it was official government affairs, any US ip address had to be let through no matter what.

daniel-s• 3 years ago

Is there any mechanism to control this in the UI? It seems like something users would want: exit from XYZ country.

DaSHacka• 3 years ago

Not in the GUI but its possible via modifying the torrc file[0].

[0] https://communitydocs.accessnow.org/147-Tor_force_exit_nodes...

TechBro86153• 3 years ago

Tor* [0]:

Note: even though it originally came from an acronym, Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people who haven't read any of our website (and have instead learned everything they know about Tor from news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.

[0] https://support.torproject.org/about/why-is-it-called-tor/

asynchronous• 3 years ago

While I know that’s the correct answer from the tor project, I still dislike it. It was/IS an acronym. Capitalization I’ve seen used across people familiar and unfamiliar with the tech.

SLWW2• 3 years ago

I remember it back in the day as fully capitalized.

Now that the TorProject has opted to correct the record, it is too little too late. Most presentations at the time did use "TOR" and it was called the TOR router. Even they understand the acronym comes from the original onion routing project from the Naval Research Lab.

All that to say, I don't know why they would try to distance themselves from what it was, and what it still is.

goodpoint5• 3 years ago

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

aaomidi4• 3 years ago

Also keep in mind TLS leaks what website you’re connecting to using SNI.

sedatk6• 3 years ago

Not with ECH. https://blog.cloudflare.com/encrypted-client-hello/

jeroenhd4• 3 years ago

Does anything even support ECH yet? It's still in a draft stage and all I see when it comes to normal web servere is low priority feature request issues that have been open for a few years.

I've checked Apache, nginx, and Caddy, but all of them have open issues. Chrome has the feature locked behind a flag and so does Firefox.

When it finally comes out, ECH will be great, but for now it's practically useless.

aaomidi4• 3 years ago

Yeah except nothing supports it

Nezteb• 3 years ago

Both the original post and root pastly.net timeout for me. Is this just a funny coincidence? Is the site only accessible via Tor? Has something nefarious happened to the site?

Either way, the original has fortunately been archived:

https://archive.is/tRo73

https://web.archive.org/web/20230715011947/https://blog.past...

bawolff2• 3 years ago

While i do think the threat model of web-pki TLS is different from TOR, with sone of the problems in 1 not present in the other and vice versa, I'm generally unconvinced it is the pancea that this article presents it as.

DNS hijacking is impossible. DNS is simply not used.

Sure, but now you have a new problem that tor hidden service identifiers are not really human identifiers. This makes attacks where you trick the user into going to the wrong site much easier.

Which is more likely - DNS hijacking + no TLS (or at least no HSTS) or a user being tricked into typing the wrong incomprehensible string of letters. Personally i find the latter to be the more realistic threat to the average user.

BGP hijacking is impossible. Every interaction a Tor client has with a relay or onion service is authenticated such that you are guaranteed to be interacting with the relay/onion that you intend to be.

I dont understand. BGP attacks in order to do passive monitoring seem just as do-able for TOR, although i guess now you need to do it in two places.

Isn't bgp hijacking (if you can do it arbitrarily, which is unrealistic) basically a global passive adversary - the main thing tor famously doesn't defend against.

There are zero places a corporate firewall can inject itself to decrypt the traffic. There are zero places and zero parties between the Tor clients that a MITM attack can be performed.

They could be the bridge. They could just spy on the client directly (usually the assumption is the corporate firewall can install stuff on your computer like custom CA certs. If push comes to shove just install spyware directly)

The main benefit tor has against corporate firewalls is it is to obscure for anyone to care.

Do you assume the CT lookup process is secure? Are the parties you're communicating with misbehaving? Are your lookups in CT logs being logged and associated with you?

Admittedly im not super familiar with CT validation, but i was under the impression that certificates contained the SCT, which is a signature that is validated on the client and that there is no (online) CT lookup . So i dont understand - how can the CT lookup process be insecure or privacy violating if it essentially doesn't exist. All that is happening on the browser is a signature validation - no additional network requests needed.

forgotmypw17• 3 years ago

Sure, but now you have a new problem that tor hidden service identifiers are not really human identifiers. This makes attacks where you trick the user into going to the wrong site much easier.

Tor promised to address v3 addresses being much less human-readable before deactivating v2, and I look forward to them doing it.

sedatk6• 3 years ago

It's a game of tradeoffs, and Tor is losing in the fast transfer speeds and responsiveness department. That's what a typical user cares about the most.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 years ago

Best part is not having to pay for a domain name or hosting just to be reachable. We already pay enough just for internet access.

Tor is not just for anonymity. It's also for reachability.

Santosh83• 3 years ago

Clearnet also works for this particular use case, disregarding anonymity. And an IPv4 address is much more readable/usable than an onion one.

PathfinderBot• 3 years ago

I believe GP was referring to the NAT-busting abilities of onion services, as well as the ability to get domain names you control via a private key. Of course, another solution would be IPv6. If you're referring to private IPv4 addresses, I can't see how that's relevant.

AmirJavar• 3 years ago

great

cookiengineer• 3 years ago

In order to prevent websites from fingerprinting with network traffic recordings (of single servers and/or exit nodes), there have to be a bunch of more implementations on network-protocol level.

In my opinion, TLS itself is not secure enough to preserve anonymity because of the threat actor (ISP/gov) being able to have recordings of "when and what" is being requested in which Browser Engine on their tracked websites. They tend to scrape websites and have recordings of time differences when which assets of a website is requested, and there's differences between WebKit, Chromium, Edge, Firefox etc. in regards to CSS, HTML, images etc. also in terms of TLS fingerprints and how their TCP/UDP stack behaves.

I wish that Tor would have support for a couple more things that are necessary to really preserve privacy from the god's eye perspective of an ISP:

- Randomization of TLS fingerprint, in the sense that the order of offered ciphers in the handshake, the TCP window size etc is randomized.

- Traffic scattering (e.g. have multiple exit nodes that are selected via a ronin to request the resources from each website)

- Traffic "trailing", which inserts random amount of NULL bytes at the end (with randomized encodings, e.g. chunked encoding, gzip Transfer Encoding, etc)

- Offline cache for both HTTP/S, DNS and WS/WebRTC in the Browser, so that websites continue to work when they've been requested already. A lot of the Browser cache mechanics are useless because webservers are implementing stupid understandings of ETags which won't work with Tor due to them being connection-specific

- Cache headers have to be modified by the Tor proxy, because they can be abused for fingerprinting. ETag and Last-Modified date headers in combination with the Pragma/Cache headers can be used to uniquely re-identify Browser clients on the other end (e.g. by using a fixed datetime in the past for each new client like 1970-01-02 03:04:05).

- User-Agent headers have to be randomized and sticky to Tabs and what the website in those Tabs request, even when they're seemingly foreign domains; but even more so when those domains have a CNAME entry.

In the past I implemented a lot of the mentioned concepts into the Stealth prototype [1] which aimed to solve this by offering a local Proxy which routes/modifies/cleans network traffic and can be used by a webview that points to it (no matter whether it's a mobile or desktop one); but I had to shift focus with my efforts to cyber defense because we Europeans are getting hit by a lot of "Kremlin-loving hacker groups". At some point I wanted to revisit these ideas again, but who knows what the future holds.

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/stealth

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

I use it to rout around censorship. They've blocked torrent sites over here luckily there's 1337.to

jeroenhd4• 3 years ago

Another nice thing Tor provides is free NAT busting. If you're behind two layers of NAT and want to expose a service elsewhere, you can use Tor as an alternative for ngrok and other services. It even comes with basic authentication support through public keys, so you can expose any service you want without worrying about someone else finding and accessing it.

I wouldn't call Tor a secure alternative to DNS, though. First of all, DNSSEC is easy to set up on a domain or in your DNS resolver settings if you care about such things (even if the underlying protocol is kinda shit), and second of all there's no way to know if hackernewsfjsushfoufbeldufbfof.onion is the real service or if you need to go to hackernewsfkfhfofusnsodifnekdj.onion; you can bookmark one and hope it's the official source, but it's basically TOFU for domains. You could use the special onion location header to specify the real onion address, but then you're back to trusting DNS again.

davidguetta2• 3 years ago

I have understood literally nothing. ELI5 ?

mike_hock3• 3 years ago

The acronyms are googleable and a basic exposition on how Tor works is available on the Tor website.

That should get you to a point where you can at least ask for a particular clarification.

psychphysic2• 3 years ago

Tor lets you share a URL with a domain name .onion[0]

That others can connect to securely. So long as you can connect to the tor network you don't need to worry about firewalls.

One criticism is that while onion addresses are secure and have authentication built in (it's kind of like if websites could be connected to by the public key of their SSL certificate) they are hard for humans to compare.

The problem is chicken and egg you have to connect over SSL using DNS to get the onion address if one is advertised.

So the first time you access it you just assume it's trust worthy. "Trust on first use" TOFU.

[0] the BBC for example advertises it's address https://www.bbcweb3hytmzhn5d532owbu6oqadra5z3ar726vq5kgwwn6a... here https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50150981.amp but getting it requires accessing the regular website first.

ShowalkKama• 3 years ago

how do you know the site for the bcc is not bbc.is, bbc.net or even bbcnews.com?

codetrotter2• 3 years ago

Presumably BBC would DMCA any site on clearnet that ripped their content and pretended to be the official site.

With an onion site on Tor they would not be able to do so easily.

But hopefully if they were running an onion site and not any regular site, they would mention their onion address frequently on their TV channel, and that way many people would know the real address.

jeroenhd4• 3 years ago

You don't, but it's easier to make fakes if you can use the exact same readable prefix since nobody will even try to remember the full domain name.

The most reliable solution is to type the business name into Google if you remember to skip the scam ads. Google doesn't track Tor, though.

WhackyIdeas4• 3 years ago

For targets of interest, those .onion addresses found on the ‘clear net’ could be switched to another similar .onion on the fly by whatever security service and just for yours truly. The switcheroo.

judge20202• 3 years ago

I would like to imagine an org could get their SSL certificate issued to both news.ycombinator.com and hackernewsfjsushfoufbeldufbfof.onion (since you can get those now), and you (or your tor client) could show authenticity by showing "this site is also the authority for: news.ycombinator.com".

jeroenhd4• 3 years ago

That will work, but it doesn't work for your standard, cheap, DV certificates. HTTPS over Tor works and is actually done by a few domains. Again, you'll be trusting the clearweb authentication mechanisms (and Tor isn't going to submit the sites you visit for certificate transparency checks) so the advantages quickly go away.

ajsnigrutin• 3 years ago

Sadly the anonymity part (at tleast as meant a few years ago) is not true anymore...

Live in a shitty country, want to tweet the truth without your government finding out and treating you like Assange? Just use tor, make a social network account and publish the truth!

And the reality? Every cloudflare based site first gives you a long and hard captcha. Then you try to register an account, and again, one of thoss arkose labs[0] captchas. Then after rotating the 7th image in the right orientation, you finally get your twitter/facebook/instagram/whatever account... you try make a first tweet/..., bam, your account closed, you need to verify with a phone number. You buy a disposable prepaid sim card, risk exposing yourself, and again get banned. A bunch of services even block tor exit nodes directly by IP.

Yeah, sure, you can run a hidden service, and all three users, that know how to use tor and find that address will see your writings, but reaching wide audiences is impossible.

yeah, i know it's just a rant, but it's a pain still

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/ArkoseLabs/comments/o4ab5r/minecraf...

jdjdjdhhd3• 3 years ago

You can create a Protonmail address with Tor and share the information that Way... Or you could use secureDrop to send the information to journalists

harry8• 3 years ago

How's SecureDrop in Belmarsh nowadays?

WhackyIdeas4• 3 years ago

True, but they will still force sms verification for that from a TOR connection.

pimpampum2• 3 years ago

What's worse is that the few in control of TOR refuse to update their threat model (which is almost 20 years old) and implement solutions for this. I guess their Navy bosses want to keep access for "the good guys inc".

belorn• 3 years ago

I am unsure what TOR developers can do to with twitter/facebook/instagram. The platforms business model is to collect personal information in order to sell advertisements, and blocking people who they can't identify is a business decision.

Tor could create their own society network but that will do nothing for people who need to reach people on those platforms.

bawolff2• 3 years ago

This whole thing is annoying, but not really a threat to anonoyminity per se.

Also there isn't really good technical solutions.

goodpoint5• 3 years ago

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

lptrac• 3 years ago

Yes, it is sad. Even if you would get through and publish a tweet, interest groups would flag and downvote, so you'd have no reach.

It is very hard for an individual to get out the truth against large groups and a preconditioned public opinion.

projektfu• 3 years ago

I don't disagree that platforms develop immune systems against various statements.

I just wonder what truths you have been attempting to divulge that are being censored.

I imagine that it's very difficult for a North Korean to discuss things openly on the Internet, and that people in less restrictive authoritarian societies need to be cautious in how they do it to avoid suspicion. Still, Americans like me do learn things about Russia and China that they would rather us not find out and discuss.

I'm not sure you can downvote a tweet, and ratioing a tweet usually increases its reach. The weird thing about Twitter is that for things to disappear they had to actively delete, or the tweeter deletes to avoid embarrassment.

Aerbil3132• 3 years ago

With I2P network you prob won't get banned. You can host and specify an outproxy also.

student2k• 3 years ago

Sad indeed, take a look at BisonRelay, it is built on top of Lightning Network, no surveillance possible, no accounts, true privacy.

https://bisonrelay.org/

Some articles explaining a bit how and why:

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/09/Trapped-in-the-Web/

https://blog.decred.org/2022/12/14/Bison-Relay-The-Sovereign...

onetimeusename• 3 years ago

This has been my experience also and people shouldn't have to feel that privacy is only needed if you want to say something with life-threatening implications where people might take more extreme measures.

The excuse given is that Tor is used for abuse but I really doubt that and I doubt banning the exit node IP addresses is the appropriate fix. My opinion is corporations don't want anonymous people using their site and second that blocking Tor is sold by snake oil salesmen for network products.

RockRobotRock• 3 years ago

good luck using anything with recaptcha.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 years ago

"Yeah, sure, you can run a hidden service, and all three users, that know how to use tor and find that address will see your writings, but reaching wide audiences is impossible."

That's actually exactly what some folks want. To communicate privately with a small network of family/friends/colleagues. Tor does not have to be for everybody. If onion services only appeal to those people who bother to learn how to use them, then that's fine. What's important is that onion services work.

The silver lining of it being impossible to reach wide, i.e., large, audiences with onion services is that this means there is no incentive for advertising and thus no incentive for so-called "tech" companies to act as eavesdropping, centralised intermediaries under the guise of providing "free services".

Some folks might not want Google to snarf their content and try to profit from it in some way, or have Facebook offer them up as a highly specific demographic ad target.

nameuponthis• 3 years ago

Interesting take. And perhaps correct from a technical and individual viewpoint. E.g. in the sense of reducing technical risk, such as reducing attack vectors (MITM, blindly trusting certificates), avoiding vulnerable protocols (DNS, TLS).

However, the definition of security seems a little narrow. Security is more than just technical personal risk. And the view that TOR increases security does not sit right.

Does TOR increase security for a single individual browsing the internet? Perhaps.

Does TOR increase security in an enterprise system? Perhaps not. The value and need for non-repudiation might be greater than the need for individual session security.

Does TOR increase security in the view of a nation? E.g. national security interests? Quite the opposite. The need for traceability might be vital, even for your individual personal security and safety (counter-terrorism and whatnot).

The blog-title is great. "Tor Is Not Just for Anonymity"! The author points out that security is a wide umbrella term. I agree! To the point that the term must be defined even wider than what is presented. And true to this: I am not stating that traceability, the need for control and non-repudiation increases security one-to-one. What is "secure" is relative.

goodpoint5• 3 years ago

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

initplus• 3 years ago

I am really becoming more and more skeptical of the security of Tor as time goes on. If it's no longer safe for buying drugs (or crypto) on the internet https://blog.torproject.org/bad-exit-relays-may-june-2020/ what makes you think it's safe for things intelligence agencies take more seriously?

Tor has received significant funding from the US intelligence community through it's entire existence. If you are US aligned is Tor safe? Advocating for democracy in some war torn dictatorship? Probably. On the other hand if you are doing something that upsets US intelligence how much would you really trust Tor?

hkt2• 3 years ago

It makes sense that Tor would be funded at a level that allows it to defend against the intelligence gathering capabilities of most countries, but not so well funded that it can exceed the intelligence gathering capabilities of the US.

However, just because something makes sense, doesn't mean it is actually true. It is incredibly difficult to determine whether or not this stuff can be effective, even with a detailed use case. At the periphery of society, there is nothing but uncertainty.

Aerbil3132• 3 years ago

This. The three letter agencies has every incentive to host a lot of Tor nodes to catch whom they don't like. Tor CANNOT defense against this, the protocol just can't.

1vuio0pswjnm73• 3 years ago

The internet is no longer as peer-to-peer friendly as it once was. Hence the existence of commercially-motivated hacks run by third parties such as hosting, e.g., Cloudflare, etc., including tunneling, e.g., ngrok, etc. Alternatively, Tor relies on third parties but AFAIK it's not so centralised and it's not commercially-motivated.

That is what differentiates it from all the other options. There is no company behind it trying to make money by exploiting internet subscribers trying to connect with each other (not the so-called "tech" company).

Tor can have uses other than the ones normally discussed such as anonymity and evading censorship. Tor can provide reachability without use of commercial eavesdropping third party intermediaries.

For example, one can use Onion Services for advertising open IP:port information that is needed for peer-to-peer connections over other, faster peer-to-peer overlay networks, not the Tor network. The Onion Service can function as the "rendezvous" server for making peer-to-peer connection outside of Tor. Tor's Onion Services can be used to exchange IP:port information for making direct connections over the internet without using Tor. No need to use commercial third parties. Ngrok, Tailscale, etc. all require use of servers run by a commercial third party. Tor does not. There is ample free software that can establish peer-to-peer connections over the internet but in every case it requires some reachable server running this software on the internet, and for most users that means they have to run a server and pay a commercial third party for hosting. Tor has no such requirement.

Imagine being able to share content with family, friends, colleagues without the need for so-called "tech" companies^1 acting as intermediaries ("middlemen"). With a reachable IPv4 address this becomes possible. It would be nice if every home internet access subscriber received a reachable IPv4 address from their ISP. No doubt, some do. But on today's internet most do not. The so-called "tech" companies all have reachable IPv4 addresses. Hence they assume the roles of middlemen and use this position to exploit internet subscribers for profit.

Something like Tor provides a solution. Again, it is not always necessary to route all traffic over Tor. Tor can have other uses. When the goal is simply peer-to-peer connections, Onion Services can be used to bootstrap peer-to-peer overlay connections using the user's choice of software by providing a secure, reliable way to exchange IP:port information. Goal here when using Tor is not anonymity nor censorship evasion, it's reachability. Similarly, goal of peer-to-peer is not necessarily anonymity nor evading censorship either, it's bypassing commercially-motivated, eavesdropping middlemen known as "tech" companies, and avoiding the annoyances of advertising. A possible additional benefot of using Tor in this way is elevated privacy. Google, for example, cannot easily discover Onion Services. No one can discover Onion Services using ICANN DNS.

1. The term "tech" as in "tech company" means a company, usually a website, that collects data from and about people to support the sale of advertising services because advertising services are the only services the company can sell on a scale large enough to sustain a profitable business.

Tor is not just for anonymity (2022)

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