A Tor of the Dark Web

http://slifty.com/2012/08/a-tor-of-the-dark-web

by slifty • 14 years ago

310 204 14 years ago

slifty4• 14 years ago

I'd like some more good Tor jokes, by the way...

jorgem• 14 years ago

The things I always wonder about TOR: Won't I look like someone else's computer? Is it possible for me to get in trouble for because someone else's traffic exits from my home network?

Ralith• 14 years ago

> Won't I look like someone else's computer?

The IP address seen by a server on the regular Internet that you contact through TOR is that of some exit node.

> Is it possible for me to get in trouble for because someone else's traffic exits from my home network?

Not unless you run an exit node yourself. The standard TOR client software does not launch an exit node by default.

fiatmoney• 14 years ago

Yes, if you're set up to allow traffic to exit from your computer. It is possible to set it up so you only serve as one of the "internal" layers.

ChrisClark• 14 years ago

Only if you choose to be a Tor exit node. And you have to set that up explicitly.

corin_2• 14 years ago

You can chose whether or not to be an exit node, so nobody else's traffic will exit through your connection if you don't want it to.

If you do enable it, my presumption is that by demonstrating that you have tor running you can show that traffic from your connection is as likely to not be you as to be you - but I'm not sure if this is backed up by law, or has been tested in court.

gizmo6862• 14 years ago

It has not been tested in court yet, however the theory is that safe harbor laws apply.

debacle3• 14 years ago

Yes, this is something that is covered extensively on the TOR FAQs. They actually recommend you set up a business entity to limit your liability.

jetti2• 14 years ago

Mind providing a link? I briefly looked at Tor's FAQ and couldn't find anything on that.

Also, a business entity wouldn't help in the chance of criminal investigation, which means the money spent creating a business entity would be for naught.

malandrew• 14 years ago

Check out the "This is a Tor Exit Router" notice https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git?a=blob_plain;hb=HEAD;f...

praptak3• 14 years ago

In addition to what other posters wrote: you can decide to run an exit node but restrict the sites that are available to Tor users. The most obvious use is to disallow your home country. For extra safety restrict it to far away countries that have no legal power where you live.

molo• 14 years ago

A couple questions.

1. Are users of .onion services protected from the server just as well as the hidden service is protected?

2. What reassurances are there that tormail is not a honeypot?

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

1. In the sense the server does not know the user's IP address so far as I know, yes.

2. No idea.

mcantelon• 14 years ago

>1. Are users of .onion services protected from the server just as well as the hidden service is protected?

An .onion server, AFAIK, might have the IP of the end point your traffic ended up going through to reach the .onion server, but not of the point of origin.

The vulnerability with Tor, as a user, comes from folks operating the Tor nodes. Adrian Lamo, the guy that sold out Bradley Manning, was running Tor nodes at one points (that's not how he got wind of Manning, but my guess is he wasn't running the Tor nodes for altruistic reasons).

ZoFreX5• 14 years ago

> An .onion server, AFAIK, might have the IP of the end point your traffic ended up going through to reach the .onion server, but not of the point of origin.

Correct. All any tor node gets with any traffic is the immediate node that it came from, and the immediate node that it is going to - only one hop in each direction.

If you get a packet from node C, to give to node E, that packet will be encrypted so that only E can decrypt it. They then "unwrap it" (like pass the parcel, or an onion) to reveal its next destination, F - and this unwrapped one is encrypted so that only F can read it.

(note: precise technical details almost certainly incorrect, but the principle is accurate)

throwaway64• 14 years ago

1) yes, in fact more so, because they rely upon no fixed keys

2) there is zero reassurance, there is also zero reassurance gmail isnt sending all your mail to the NSA, etc. TOR helps you ensure you can keep you tormail and your clearnet identities as separate as possible, alternatively, run your own service.

chimeracoder• 14 years ago

As stated in a comment above, using PGP/GPG could help. If those emails are encrypted, that adds an extra layer of security around the contents of those emails.

(Of course, that rests on the security of prime-number encryption, which may not be the best assumption when dealing with the NSA, but that's another discussion.)

nikcub3• 14 years ago

> 2. What reassurances are there that tormail is not a honeypot?

None, which is why you should always use PGP. The advantage of tormail is they provide a free onion interface to email.

ZoFreX5• 14 years ago

2. You can't ever know for sure but doesn't necessarily matter. The point of tor is NOT to keep your activities secret (for example, your exit node would be able to read any plaintext traffic you send, such as regular HTTP, or IRC, and also know your patterns of access - which IPs, how much data, etc) - it is to disconnect the ownership of those activities from your "real life" identity.

Assume anyone can read those emails you're sending on Tor, and act accordingly (i.e. no information that could identify you).

columbo• 14 years ago

FYI this is all I get running chromium in linux: http://i.imgur.com/7FUlr.png

justincormack• 14 years ago

Same with Chrome on Android after a flash of the content...

slifty4• 14 years ago

Yep -- apologies for that. I found the offending plugin and killed it dead.

klearvue3• 14 years ago

A word of advice for those living under truly oppressive governments - do not connect to Tor directly (nor to a Tor bridge, to be on the safe side). Get a cheap VPS/EC2 abroad and use SSH tunnel to connect to that and from then onwards - to a Tor bridge. The reason is that, if connecting to Tor directly, security services will be able to figure out you are using Tor (although not what you are using it for) and may take an interest.

tuxcanfly• 14 years ago

By the same logic, won't they be able to detect SSH tunneled traffic too?

noonespecial2• 14 years ago

My advice would be to spin up a free EC2 instance, put a small "dog fancy" type blog/website up with a few articles about poodles, and then use something like openVPN to tunnel your traffic via tcp, port 443 through this.

It looks like you're just doing your wordpress thing, fancying your dogs. Just watch how much data you tunnel this way. 500 gig in a month might raise some eyebrows.

Also remember to use your regular un-vpn'd connection to visit ILoveAhmadinejad.com on a fairly regular basis so not all your traffic goes to this mysterious blog.

praptak3• 14 years ago

There's a world of difference between "citizen spotted using SSH" and "citizen spotted using Tor".

In the first case you are just one in a huge number of people using SSH to avoid sniffers. With Tor the authorities know you're doing something you'd rather not be seen doing. It's a much, much bigger red flag.

bwilson• 14 years ago

Many people who need Tor can't afford or are unable to purchase VPSes abroad. However, the obfsproxy feature is available in the latest versions of Tor, which can mask traffic, and worked effectively against Iran's DPI earlier this year. You can contact the Tor Project directly to get a few bridges that support this feature.

https://www.torproject.org/projects/obfsproxy.html.en

nikcub3• 14 years ago

Jeremy Hammond, aka. 'Anarchaos', the Lulzsec member from Chicago, who was raided and arrested[1] by the FBI used Tor and it is mentioned in his indictment as one of the points that lead to his identification.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/03/stakeout-how-the-...

[2] http://www.scribd.com/doc/84134934/Hammond-Jeremy-Complaint - Tor info starts at sec 37.

dfc3• 14 years ago

First of all the discussion of TOR starts at section 39. The FBI did not identify Anarchaos traffic coming out the other end of the TOR network. The FBI did not identify Anarchaos because of TOR. The complaint mentions that Anarchaos had previously mentioned the use of TOR and that one of the devices (Mac laptop) on the network under surveillance connected to a known TOR router. The complaint goes on to correlate traffic from the laptop to the TOR network with Anarchaos's presence in his residence.

They already knew who he was before they found the TOR traffic. Thats why they had a PEN/TRAP warrant, and wireless and physical surveilance in place.

zalew• 14 years ago

How governments have tried to block Tor [28C3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwMr8Xl7JMQ

klearvue3• 14 years ago

thanks so much for that video, inspired me to make a resolution to volunteer for Tor

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

Ooh, the Tor darknet. I went there recently out of curiosity. You can get used to doing everything over Tor quite quickly, if you use it for everything you don't really notice the latency.

Yes, Tor has CP, but I didn't look for it so I didn't find it. Same with all manner of other illegal content, pretty sure it's there.

I2P and Freenet are more interesting than Tor, though, because they are truly P2P. Freenet is basically a distributed hash table (DHT) for HTML, CSS, image, and other files. It filters scripts and cross-origin requests out of HTML before serving them. I2P is like Tor, but everyone's a relay node (truly P2P, no central origin), and it's faster, but I haven't tried I2P. I have been on Freenet... it's slower than Tor!

corin_2• 14 years ago

> Yes, Tor has CP, but I didn't look for it so I didn't find it. Same with all manner of other illegal content, pretty sure it's there.

My assumption is that the open web has it too - but given tor isn't a single place with a directory to everywhere, I don't see how you could stumble on it accidentally at all.

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

Well, since Tor's anonymous, (secure enough) directories with legitimate sites also have illegitimate sites.

Also, yes, I think the open web probably has CP too, but Tor's anonymity means that CP is probably up for longer there, I suppose.

I've never visited any such sites, this is mostly speculation.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

Tor was not "designed by the Navy" to protect dignitaries in cars or ships or whatever it is this article is alluding to. It was an academic research project for the NRL's CHACS group (NRL : CHACS :: MIT : Lincoln Lab).

If you look at the project's publication history, it was almost from the jump (and continues to be today) a project intended to frustrate online censorship. The DOD, via both DARPA and the NRL, continues to sponsor the project.

dsirijus• 14 years ago

He mentioned that IDEA, not the implementation nor Tor were invented by the Navy.

I have no sources on either, but it does seem plausible that solution similar or exactly the same in the concept was used for communication during warfare.

tptacek2• 14 years ago

Tor exists at least in part because the US DOD decided that investing money in countering online censorship was a worthy use of military funding. This seems like an important point; it is not made effectively by the article.

derrida2• 14 years ago

> He mentioned that IDEA, not the implementation nor Tor were invented by the Navy.

Actually a creator and core developer of Tor is from the Navy. The implementation came from this person as much as it did from arma and nickm (the other 2 creators)

slifty4• 14 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_routing -- search "Navy"

And don't you try to tell me that the Navy doesn't try to protect its king.

runn1ng4• 14 years ago

Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.)

GOD.

There are seriously forums full of pedofiles sharing pictures and - maybe worse? - their stories and wisdoms. Maybe out of utter fascination, I spend about few hours on there and I felt like I want to murder all humanity. On one of these forums, there was this alleged "doctor", who adviced people, from what age you can have sex with your children without their doctor to notice. Tips how to kidnap young children. The worst thing was that I just knew that - if they don't do something stupid - they are basically untracable and uncatchable, while I would simply want to catch them all and kill them one by one. (I am sorry for being so expressive.)

There were also some picture forums but really I couldn't stand that, I just wanted to vomit while I was shaking.

I... am not sure why I am writing this. I am all for Tor. But we have to admit - when everything is allowed and anonymous, EVERYTHING is allowed and anonymous. And the dark parts of humanity flow on top. Drug markets, weapon markets, assasin markets (altough I don't know how sersiously to take those), terrorist websites, child porn websites.

But - as hard it is for me to say it - to see that the seriously f...d up child molesters are freely allowed to say really anything there and noone has a chance to catch them just shows that Tor is really anonymous and safe.

edit: I do not know if The Hidden Wiki is still operating, if the dark places I visited are still operating, it is about one year and I did not feel any urge to revisit it again.

mynameishere2• 14 years ago

freely allowed to say really anything

Well, that's allowed on the normal internet for the most part.

nsmartt2• 14 years ago

That is utter nonsense.

I don't even know where to begin. Technically, you can say whatever you want, but you cannot expect to avoid persecution (or prosecution) if you do.

rorrr• 14 years ago

Try openly writing about your plans of assassinating some high-level official. You won't last a day.

noonespecial2• 14 years ago

That's the proof that its working. As you say, when the child molesters are really and truly safe to speak their minds, everyone is.

These people would exist anyway. Sometimes humanity sucks. Interesting though, TOR allowed you to study them in a way you would never have been able to otherwise. It merely disgusted you, but it could be a valuable resource to someone who studies how people break and thinks about what might be possibly done to help or hinder them.

fatbird3• 14 years ago

Whether or not they exist anyway, it seems obvious to me that a supportive peer group is going to increase their effectiveness at predation.

Perhaps they talk about it so much that they don't get around to doing it--studies on violent pornography and child pornography sometimes find that viewers use them as a safe outlet to actually doing it themselves. But that's a huge gamble. At present, TOR is simply enabling child predators to be better child predators.

elorant• 14 years ago

I bet law enforcement agencies crawl those places frequently trying to lure child molesters. And that's the good part of the story, without the Internet in general or specifically Tor there would be little chance to catch those pricks. The more they express themselves the easier I guess it gets to nail one or two of them eventually.

stcredzero• 14 years ago

> As you say, when the child molesters are really and truly safe to speak their minds, everyone is.

Not the most attractive canary I could possibly imagine.

rodolphoarruda• 14 years ago

Oh yeah. Ethics and moral values simply evaporate when we are unable to see/watch one another in society. We are suppressed animals. Go watch 'Blindness'[1]; it is the real life representation of the dark web.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/

anonymous• 14 years ago

As wrong as it sounds, maybe it's for the better to have a forum where pedophiles can aggregate knowledge on how to safely (physically speaking) molest children. Also, I have to say that while I find the idea of sex with children repulsive, having a place where you can discuss the topic should be 100% ok.

Child rape is awful, talking about child rape is unsettling, but having someone proactively monitor my communications is even more unsettling. It feels like a stranger offering me candy.

Besides, for this particular problem, the best solution seems to be what we're already doing - tell as many children as possible that if someone tries to rape them, there are people who will listen and help.

fatbird3• 14 years ago

You don't think that enabling them to discuss it, enables them to carry it out? Who's the more effective child predator: the one who does it alone, with little guidance or feedback from others; or the guy who spends time discussing it with a supportive peer group and perhaps carrying out predation with their help?

The only value to such a forum is for monitoring and catching them. If by definition the forum isn't useful for that because it's TOR, then that's a giant negative for me in the existence of TOR. If the cost of assisting dissidents is that children get raped... then I don't know that we should be assisting dissidents this way.

rmc4• 14 years ago

No. Free speech rights are limited.

jchrisa• 14 years ago

I didn't click through the links described (or even have time to install Tor), but it occurs to me that one may be able to find these guys via statistical analysis of writing style.

Spider the web and then correlate less-anonymous writings with the stuff the ringleaders are saying on the Darknet.

S4M• 14 years ago

Interesting idea. Do you have any link of methods to identify people by writing style? Google didn't give me anything. To be honest I am a bit skeptical that it's possible but I'd appreciate to be proven wrong.

pvarangot• 14 years ago

A while ago Anonymous hacked one of those forums and published the usernames and hashes. Apparently a lot of them where using the same usernames and passwords in another porn-related forums in the "lit" web.

Don't know if it resulted in someone being caught by the police or not, but definitely subtler methods such as statistical analysis of writing style are not the only way to get a lead from those forums.

mobweb• 14 years ago

Perhaps that would work, but taking that idea one step further: I doubt that there's anything you could do to them legally, because the evidence of a similar writing style most likely wouldn't hold up in court. IANAL but I think the least you need to prosecute someone for their actions on the internet is an IP and a statement from the ISP that the IP was assigned to this users account at that very moment.

And then again I am unsure if simply visiting and contributing to such a forum could get you in any trouble, legally.

ZoFreX5• 14 years ago

Oh, you could catch them much more directly than that. There are technical means through which you can very easily track them down, if they make certain mistakes in their setup. On a non-technical side, it's often quite easy to social engineer people into giving you just enough information to track them (a kind of social equivalent to privilege escalation).

As part of another gig I worked on ways to track people, or more commonly to work out if two distinct users were actually the same human, and I'm almost salivating at the thought of all the potential ways authorities could bring some of these people to justice.

liedra• 14 years ago

You can to a certain degree, yeah. There was a project in the UK that looked at using NLP to determine what age/gender child groomers are (to see if they were adults impersonating children in order to befriend children online). It was pretty successful (the Isis project - see http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=pedophile-p... for an overview). The problem is that doing this sort of thing "live" is ethically dubious - not only for the privacy of the child but also for the privacy of the potential offender (because being labelled paedophile is probably one of the worst things you can be labelled - imagine if you are falsely accused).

So yeah, you'd need a huge amount of certainty that this was "the guy", and, frankly, storing enough data about individual writing styles for comparison means it's highly unlikely (right now) that this would be possible to do from a technical perspective, and potentially ethically dubious even if the technology were there - what constitutes "public data" on the internet from a privacy and data protection perspective?

patrickgzill• 14 years ago

How many are Feds, on the site you mention? Something you did not take into consideration.

thinkingisfun4• 14 years ago

What can the feds do, other than take note of the information the predators exchange? How protective do you think pedophiles are of their real identity, or clues that might lead to it?

Something you did not take into consideration.

As if the most gut-wrenching bits were written by feds, which you surely did not mean to imply, how does it matter if even 80% were feds?

naner• 14 years ago

...just shows that Tor is really anonymous and safe.

It shows that the groups who go after and prosecute these people don't have the resources or motivation to get to all of them.

When you have a very significant target of the US (near the wanted level of Bin Landen) or China talking freely on Tor without getting caught, then perhaps you can rule it as being seriously anonymous.

I don't know about other countries, but in the US I generally only hear about people getting prosecuted for CP and similar crimes when they are caught in the act or when somehow the computer files get accidentally discovered or reported by some 3rd party.

doktrin• 14 years ago

This is an important point. The anonymity of Tor relies on finding safety in numbers (or rather, among numbers).

However, the bar doesn't have to be quite that high in order for Tor to be considered de-facto anonymous. There is an order of magnitude separating the resources available to a local police force and the entire DoD. Criminals guilty of capital offenses might only garner the attention of the former, whereas someone at a 'Bin Laden' level of notoriety would be chased with the near-limitless resources of a superpower's defense apparatus.

pdsull• 14 years ago

The feds conduct ongoing child porn investigations, not just passive enforcement. Once someone with CP is found, the feds often try to seize the provider in order to collect information on other offenders, which in turn leads to further arrests/prosecutions. And the cycle continues. I used to think Child Porn was rare. I was wrong.

runn1ng4• 14 years ago

China is blocking Tor outright and pretty effectively.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/OONI/censo...

mike-cardwell• 14 years ago

I hope you're not in the UK. Just looking at that stuff, whatever the reason, is enough to get you on the sex offender register here.

nacker10• 14 years ago

Good point. Especially in the UK, the so-called "good guys" are a hair's breadth away from a doctrine of thought-crime, and pre-crime.

kika• 14 years ago

I can add to disgust: 50% (unsubstantiated claim) of these people are active duty federal and state officers, sitting behind their boring desks in their boring offices across the country.

Seriously, though, if you think about it from this perspective then you'll agree that Tor is a great thing. Instead of working knee deep in the dirt, risking their real lives finding highly suspective local small groups of child abusers and infiltrating them, officers can do their jobs sipping lattes under air conditioner and risking no more than their avatars.

Cushman5• 14 years ago

> Drug markets, weapon markets, assasin markets (altough I don't know how sersiously to take those), terrorist websites, child porn websites.

One of these things, is not like the others...

dhimes• 14 years ago

I assume you are talking about "drug markets."

TWAndrews2• 14 years ago

I hope that law enforcement agencies at least use this as a window into how these people operate.

DanBC6• 14 years ago

> Yes, I know I shouldn't say it out loud, but here I am saying it (take me, Police) - out of curiosity, I went to Hard Candy section of The Hidden Wiki. (Yes, it is exactly what you would think it is.)

That was a ridiculously reckless thing for you to do. You've opened yourself up to a variety of legal sanctions.

Knowingly, deliberately, breaking the law is a bafflingly dumb thing to do, especially when the consequences to your life would be so severe.

nacker10• 14 years ago

There are many bafflingly dumb laws. Hundreds of them. If I was smoking cannabis right now I might be thrown in jail for breaking the law. The problem is that there are so many stupid laws and so many state goons employed to enforce them.

vacri• 14 years ago

Comedians constantly talk publicly and on record about having broken the law. Thing is, based on one HN comment, there's nothing to go on. If it goes to court, runn1ng just has to say "I made it all up to get attention". If there's no other evidence of wrongdoing, it'll be hard to make anything stick.

konstruktor• 14 years ago

Let me put on my tin foil hat for a moment: Tor being anonymous, there is no way to know whether what you saw was a.) authentic content created (mostly) by actual child molesters b.) excellent copy written to cause maximum outrage against tor by some entity that does not like tor c.) somewhere in between, e.g. making sure that you actually stumble upon CP every once in a while when using onion sites

While b is not very probable, I can actually imagine that c is a pretty easy option to put many decent people off using tor.

ArneBab2• 14 years ago

So now all this information about them is freely available. Why doesn’t the police do text and psychology analyses to find those people?

Once you write, you give something of you away.

yosho• 14 years ago

Be careful about visiting those sites. If you have any of the images saved in any sort of browser cache you could have criminal charges brought against you for possession of child porn. This is doubly true if you work in tech or IT and know a lot about computers... which I'm assuming many people in HN are

poft8• 14 years ago

I am a pedophile and I use Tor.

I use it not to share pictures nor commit crimes but to do what you say is worse: talk to other pedophiles. Tor permits us a safe support forum.

fatbird says: Whether or not they exist anyway, it seems obvious to me that a supportive peer group is going to increase their effectiveness at predation.

Quite the opposite in fact. Dialogue among pedophiles facilitates two things that you might not have expected:

1. Greater awareness of the draconian consequences which generally result from breaking certain laws, and a corresponding discouragement of doing so in the first place.

2. Most importantly, it gives us role models beyond the ugly stereotypes society has created for us: each other. Since role models are by definition templates for action, this makes it far less likely that we'll act as badly as society would expect.

I can't claim that all pedophile forums are like this. But the ones I frequent -- which are among the most popular -- are, and the less we're driven underground, the more our dialogue will resemble my description and the less it will resemble yours.

setheron• 14 years ago

are you actually a pedophile? Just curious.

gws• 14 years ago

In your opinion what is the overall impact on children safety of something like Tor? Positive, negative or neutral? I realize this is tough to answer.

throw4397901• 14 years ago

One thing that really bothers me about the whole war on child porn is that there seems to be no difference in gradation to people: people seem to think that a pedophile is the worst kind of human that can possibly exist no matter the circumstances. I think the following three scenarios are very different:

A. An 18 year old falls in love with a 14 year old girl, they're completely comfortable with each other and have some sexual experimentation.

B. A 35 year old captures and rapes a 14 year old girl.

C. 35 year old is attracted to young and innocent, cute-looking girls, and sometimes feels attracted to 10 year old girls on the street in bikinis. He does, however, not deliberately go to swimming pools in order to spot them. He deals with his fetish by watching animated cartoons of young-looking people engaging in consensual sex and dating petite women that have cute manners, well above the age of consent.

Our strategy for dealing with child porn should be aimed at reducing the number of actual children harmed, and turning as many pedophiles from group B into group C as possible. A support group where you can anonymously exchange stories could definitely help.

So long as we, as a society, hold the position that pedophile C is no different from pedophile B, we may pressure people that really don't want to rape children into feeling a kinship with people who do think it is normal to rape children.

raikia• 14 years ago

wow

Revisor• 14 years ago

Tor is meant for dissidents and the oppressed, that's all fine and cool. But for me as a business community admin Tor always, always means trouble. Either the user using it is a scammer, a fraud or in the best case only a troll.

AceJohnny2• 14 years ago

Unfortunately for every good user (dissident, whistleblower ,etc) you'll have 100 disgusting users. (it'd be interesting the know the ratio, but by Tor's very nature you can't!)

The promoters rationale is that the protection it provides the endangered good user is worth having to put up with the disgusting ones.

telecuda11• 14 years ago

I wish there were a simple way to communicate how large and widespread CP is, and how much law enforcement could use your smarts to go after these guys.

There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops. (We can roughly map IPs of known CP files advertised over torrent networks.)

There are too few innovators in this space because specifics on CP networks are privy to law enforcement, and investigators are often patrol cops who get promoted into a child crimes unit.

It's fine (and true) to say these technologies are used for many more things than CP, but that's not an excuse to turn a blind eye to it, anymore than Craigslist does to child exploitation.

Wohlf• 14 years ago

> There are more households sharing CP in your community than there are bus stops.

Sorry if I'm wrong, but I find that hard to believe. Any amount of CP is a problem IMO, but I don't think it's that bad. In my metropolitan area there's around 1,671,683 people, and I'd be surprised to learn there's 1000 honest-to-god pedos.

telecuda11• 14 years ago

I live in a metropolitan area of around 500,000 and there are close to 200 markers indicating an IP address that's advertising CP availability.

We have methods of rating each marker (e.g. how many CP files, how many are teen, child, nudity vs. intercourse, etc). Of those 200, there are a handful of the worst offenders that law enforcement will use resources to pursue, a group in the middle that have downloaded a large number where victims are 12-18, and then those who have just a few random files from the known list.

Does that help?

qw• 14 years ago

> There are too few innovators in this space

I don't know much about US law, but in my country it's illegal to even look at an image, even if it is part of a private investigation.

I'm sure that many would volunteer to help, but not while they'd risk jail time themselves

telecuda11• 14 years ago

There's plenty that can be done that never involves having to look at an image yourself.

For instance, if I gave you a specific file name/size/hash (but not showing you the actual image), could you find out who possesses it, is distributing it, and anything about their location or identity that would aid law enforcement in catching the bandit?

bestes• 14 years ago

Does anyone have references to studies or data? I tried looking once, but couldn't even find a proper definition.

taixzo• 14 years ago

I can't tell from this article whether the author is for or against Tor.

slifty4• 14 years ago

Achievement Unlocked: JOURNALISM

runjake2• 14 years ago

> They can’t decrypt messages but they are able to track where everything comes from and where it is going. They can’t tell what you’re saying, but they have all they need.

He's talking about SSL here, right? For the record, this is completely incorrect. If "they" have access to a trusted CA (and circumstantial evidence says they do), they can MITM and snoop on whatever they want.

SSL encryption is not secure against state-sponsored attackers and sophisticated criminal enterprises.

rmc4• 14 years ago

If you are serious about encryption, you can use SSL without the Certification Authority system. Just self sign your own certs and only trust them.

runjake2• 14 years ago

And when you eliminate all of the default cert stores, then important things on the standard OSes most people use like Mac OS X and Windows will break, such as online banking, webmail, and security updates.

nuje2• 14 years ago

No, the thought experiment didn't mention or imply SSL/TLS.

Your claim also only applies to the f'd up CA bundle that browsers ship by default, it's not a property of SSL/TLS.

co-n-sci-o-us• 14 years ago

Tor is the solution to getting hellbanned at HN.

That is "censorship", no?

Tor is also the solution to your Twitter API woes. Like it or not. I'm sure many SEO people use it to get around Google's restrictions. These are not necessarily uses that infringe anyone's IP. Twitter is UGC. And Google caches the entire web, indiscriminantly.

Tor, like the 'net itself, is controversial. It can be used for bad things. It can also be used for good things. It could be used to break criminal laws, or to enable copyright infringment. It could be used to violate TOS that may or may not be enforceable in civil court. Or it could be used just to evade idiosyncratic censorship by some webmaster that has no legal basis whatsoever. (This comment itself is being posted through Tor.) It is, however, any way you look at it, useful.

There may be an "intended purpose" for Tor. But as with almost all software, that means little. Users decide how they will use it. And that is unpredictable.

Did the folks at MIT, when they developed Tor, say to themselves, "You know, this will be used to commit crime"? Probably. But they also probably envisioned some other uses that were of undisputed benefit to society.

As someone else said, MIT is still behind Tor. Grep the source for the Tor client for IP numbers. You will find that some belong to MIT. My understanding is that Tor is controlled by a small group (maybe only one person) because like anything else that uses a network, there has to be a bootstrap, a "root" that hands out the initial addresses. And anyone that uses the Tor trusts that root. Somewhere there is/are a few people with a great responsibility on their hands: they make Tor possible, for better, or worse.

More people need to use Tor for non-criminal purposes. Using Tor as a workaround for censorship, whether it is on HN, or in some oppressed country is to be expected. If you are the censor, and you don't like it, ban Tor. It is not difficult. HN does not ban Tor.

One of the great myths on the 'net is that an IP address equates to a machine or a customer account. False. It represents an interface, which is itself an ephemeral concept. Interfaces can be created, cloned or destroyed at the blink of an eye.

This may all be frightening or it may be exciting, it all depends on how you look at it. It shouldn't matter whether you are a good samaritan or a criminal. It is just technology. Abstract tools. A hammer can be used to build something or it can be used to destroy something. It has no moral sensibility on its own.

That's up to you, the user.

As a Tor user (I can't post to HN without it), it bothers me that others are using it for criminal purposes. But when I look at hammer, I see a tool for creation, not destruction. I think like a carpenter. What can we build?

The hammer has no consciousness of its own, any more than Tor does.

drKarl• 14 years ago

Just curiosity... why is it that you can't post to HN without Tor?

angli• 14 years ago

My assumption would be that he's hellbanned

nacker10• 14 years ago

Tor is good, but totalitarianism is galloping to control the internet. They HATE the freedom we have come to take for granted, and they are surely encouraged by how easily the sheep are persuaded to acquiesce whenever they point at the familiar boogey men: paedophiles, terrorists, drug dealers, etc.

I am quite optimistic though about the development of mesh networks such as http://project-byzantium.org

Of course it will only take one state to declare it illegal, and there will be plenty of cowardly fools urging each other NEVER to use it, because it's just too DANGEROUS, and anyway, TERRORISTS find it useful for pursuing their nefarious and immoral activities.

I will keep on ignoring them.

eliben• 14 years ago

Can you point to a good technical description of how Tor works under the hood?

drostie• 14 years ago

If you are requesting a very high-level description: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en . Basically you send an "envelope within an envelope within an envelope" over TLS (formerly SSL) to some node, they open it, read the address on the envelope inside, and send it on, until it gets to the last letter-opener who happens to also be the sort of node which follows instructions on a sheet of paper. Those instructions may be an HTTP request for example, or you might ask them to communicate part of a TLS negotiation with a secure web site, so that they cannot eavesdrop. The envelopes themselves are encryption containers, so that you can't open the envelopes en route to see where they're going.

If you want to understand more details about how exactly you create these "extending" routes and "circuits", the design docs are here:

https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation.html.en#Design...

In particular, the above picture is a little naive because you cannot send three open envelopes to the exit node for the return trip without the exit node learning who you are by peeking inside.

dumbluck3• 14 years ago

Places where illegal content is shared and people communicate for nefarious reasons and tools that create these places are just magnets for those wishing to find such people.

Anyone that chooses to take part in such things is at a heightened risk, no matter what they are doing.

There is no guaranteed right to privacy, regardless what your government decrees or what the tool you're using claims to do.

Those using Tor will be caught and charged as if they are enabling what the others are doing.

Be warned.

nacker10• 14 years ago

So, according to you, we have no right to privacy, and we will be "caught and charged" regardless of justice or the facts.

This sounds very much like a warning from Big Brother.

Be warned, Biggie, when the revolution comes, you just might find yourself with an appointment with the guillotine.

dumbluck3• 14 years ago

No, this is a warning for people that think they can work in a public space and be private. Privacy is a struggle, not a right. If you use a tool and expect it to keep your privacy, you should not be surprised when it doesn't work.

As for the guillotine, if big brother (which isn't me, I might add) goes on the chopping block, there is always another to take his place. The more people fight for privacy and the more people hack and cause damage, the greater big brother becomes to compensate. It was said that the meek will inherit the earth, and it is true.

muyuu5• 14 years ago

I hate it how all discussion about anonymity and privacy ends up in CP.

derrida2• 14 years ago

People that argue that Tor enables crime do not realise that Tor also enables law enforcement (LE). Anonymity has been a tactic of LE from the beginning. Undercover LE use anonymous looking clothes to blend in with civilians to monitor criminals, police fighting drug cartels in Mexico wear masks to protect themselves and their families, informants require anonymity in order to assist LE with information. But there aren't sites in the onion exchanging this sort of information, you don't see it, which is the way it is designed to be.

A Tor of the Dark Web

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