Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it \ stacker news ~tech

Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it www.engadget.com/tor-dark-web-privacy-secure-browser-anonymous-130048839.html

2448 sats \ 14 comments \ @kristapsk 28 Jul 2023 tech

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121 sats \ 5 replies \ @sudonaka 28 Jul 2023

No one gives a fuck about that. We are transitioning to a trustless system.

Does BoA or Chase have a good reputation? Does Chrysler have a good reputation after getting bailed out by American taxpayers then immediately after selling the whole company to Europe?

We don’t need to trust or have “reputation” if we can verify.

Also debt = trust. Fuck your credit score.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 29 Jul 2023

No one gives a fuck about that. We are transitioning to a trustless system.

I wish this was true.

The truth is, Tor is niche enough in society and alternatives are even more niche.

If you want "We are transitioning" you need to achieve both 1. Increased interest of society at large and 2. Increase interest of the privacy focused community.

0 sats \ 3 replies \ @l0k18 28 Jul 2023

Would be nice to not transmit bitcoin and lightning transactions over the clearnet, connecting keys and locations together... There's enough bitcoin nodes being intentionally used to track the origin points of transactions to narrow it down after a few repeats. Come to that, why should I ever give away my geolocation to any website at all????

1 sat \ 2 replies \ @sudonaka 28 Jul 2023

Use tor all the time!

What I’m saying is no one should care about “reputation” of tor. Everyone should use it especially for nodes

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 29 Jul 2023

I don't use Tor all the time because it is slow, because several important sites I use don't work with it and in general it throws up a lot of roadblocks in its intended use case of web proxy.

I was very enthusiastic about Tor in the early days, and tried running SSH, streaming media and IRC systems over it. For long lived and high bandwidth use cases it is a disaster. Even if you use Mosh instead of straight SSH over Tor it's still gonna randomly disconnect during a session and cost you another 5 minutes trying to get it started again.

This is not new to me, it's why I started to get the notion of what Indra is back 10 years ago before Tor was even 5 years old. Back in the days when not every site had SSL yet. Tor, and I2P, these are both targeted at web services, which is a whole different messaging pattern to long lived interactive sessions and low latency streaming. The applications simply don't know how to cope with such an unreliable connection that gives zero clue of a breakdown in the path, and takes minutes to get around to reestablishing it.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 28 Jul 2023

It's not a very reliable connection. They have kicked the can down the road a bit with the PoW on hidden services but the architecture of it just isn't anything like a fit to the p2p traffic model. It was built for web services without streaming/gossip messaging underpinning the function of the network.

0 sats \ 7 replies \ @l0k18 28 Jul 2023

Tor is a toy of spooks and drug dealers. It's not scalable enough to be a network transport, and has critical design flaws and rigid architecture that resists the kinds of changes that would really fix things.

I mean, client side proof of work, really, guys, could it get any more obvious that we need a micropayment powered relay network? or?

2 sats \ 6 replies \ @ryu 29 Jul 2023

Tor still has its utility for those who know to be careful with exit relays and practice basic opsec using it (not logging in to anything revealing, using pseudo or fully anonymous services, etc.), but I2P is technically superior in every regard.

The only reason Tor is used more is because I2P is fucking difficult to setup outside of Windows and non-systemd Linux distros.

146 sats \ 0 replies \ @jonatack 29 Jul 2023

For Bitcoiners who run nodes:

https://jonatack.github.io/articles/using-alternative-p2p-networks-with-bitcoin-core

You can start running your node over I2P, for example in addition to over Tor, in less than 5 minutes:

Install i2pd (I2P daemon) on the command line:

Linux:

$ apt install i2pd && systemctl enable i2pd.service && systemctl start i2pd.service

MacOS:

$ brew install i2pd && brew services start i2pd
Add these options to your bitcoin.conf configuration file and save it (on Linux it is usually located in the ~/.bitcoin/ directory, and on macOS in ~/Library/Application\ Support/Bitcoin):

i2psam=127.0.0.1:7656 debug=i2p
Restart your node with Bitcoin Core version 22 and up.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @kristapsk OP 29 Jul 2023

I2P is fucking difficult to setup outside of Windows and non-systemd Linux distros.

What? It's simple to use i2pd on Gentoo Linux, which uses OpenRC not systemd by default. Basically:

$ sudo emerge -av i2pd
$ sudo rc-update add i2pd default
$ /etc/init.d/i2pd start

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ryu 29 Jul 2023

Maybe my take stems from being one of the few that until recently used dinit on an Artix install.

Very clean and pluggable init, terrible if a service you install doesn't just work. i2p/i2pd being one of those.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @legxxi 29 Jul 2023

Yeah but most people need to download something, double click on an icon and it should work.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @l0k18 29 Jul 2023

Gentoo linux. I'm sure it's easy on Arch too. Most people are running Debian or derivatives though.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk OP 29 Jul 2023

And they have systemd.