Tor is funded by the US State Department

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No?

Oh...
 
I'm surprised so many people here aren't familiar with TOR. I thought GAF was more in-the-know about this sort of thing. I was also surprised, after reading the thread title, that the article leaned the way it did. I thought it'd be more about the State Department having logs of TOR activity, which would defeat the entire purpose of TOR. Instead, it went in some crazy direction about child pron and illegal activity. Bizarre.

That's the way I thought it was going to go as well.
 
i thought this was about the book publisher and i got really confused

Same.

I've never heard of this other TOR. Sounds like a hive of scum and villainy.

I remember there being some firefox plugin a few years back that added a secondary message board/chat functionality to every website you visited. I remember there being some interesting chatter on it when you reached GAF.

I can't remember what the plugin was called. The activity was clearly dying down when I tried it.
 
yikes. i almost used silk road a few months ago! Glad I talked myself out of it. Not that I feel like there's any connection, like it's a big honey trap, but this story would make me paranoid.
 
yikes. i almost used silk road a few months ago! Glad I talked myself out of it. Not that I feel like there's any connection, like it's a big honey trap, but this story would make me paranoid.

Tor is certainly not some a honeypot. If it was, all the pedos and drug sellers would have been busted a long time ago and so would all the server providers. It's not like silk road and what not doesn't work.
 
Makes sense. I would not be surprised if a good portion of anonymizing proxies were run by the US federal government, either. First, because it gives dissidents in oppressive countries a way to communicate, and secondly because the proxy provider can spy on the user of the proxy. A CIA run proxy would probably be great at keeping tabs on dumb terrorists.

Their support of TOR is probably more one dimensional. I don't think you can effectively track users just by providing infrastructure.
 
There is no "chance" to take. You don't randomly stumble onto "seedy" things. Tor is simply a routing network that includes its own DNS-like service. You only get to "seedy" things if you choose to put in a domain name that involves them, just like the public internet.

maybe I'm wrong, but I thought what he meant is that he WANTS to get to the seedy sites, but he still doesn't want to "take the chance" fearing that there are people actually monitoring you when you are on TOR.

edit: nah I think I'm wrong. The way he worded it does sound like he's afraid that TOR will just randomly send him to some child porn site or something.
 
Tor is certainly not some a honeypot. If it was, all the pedos and drug sellers would have been busted a long time ago and so would all the server providers. It's not like silk road and what not doesn't work.



oddly enough, the thing that worries me the most is that there haven't been busts...so no checklist of what not to do.

That was 10% of it, other 90% of it was that I finally found a good local guy with good stuff at decent prices.

still, Silk Road was mighty tempting, but still, I would never use it. All that bit coin laundering stuff looked like a massive pain in the ass anyway.
 
I want to see what is on Silk Road out of curiosity. I don't think stating that is agains the TOS or anything, is it?

I set up the TOR browser bundle on my Mac and went to the link from the wired.com article. The link in that article takes you to a page that says the URL has changed to an easier to remember name. When I go to that URL, the browser just hangs and never loads. Any idea?
 
I want to see what is on Silk Road out of curiosity. I don't think stating that is agains the TOS or anything, is it?

I set up the TOR browser bundle on my Mac and went to the link from the wired.com article. The link in that article takes you to a page that says the URL has changed to an easier to remember name. When I go to that URL, the browser just hangs and never loads. Any idea?



you sure TOR is running? Sounds like what happens when you don't have it running. It's possible the URL was changed too maybe?

and no, it shouldn't be illegal to just browse at silk road. it's pretty fascinating and I don't think there's anything illegal to see, though I never clicked on the XXX section.
 
For those interested in trying out Tor, they do offer USB portable browser apps that should work for most people.

Good for getting around web filters at your work or university, though I would never check my email or visit a banking/money site while connected to TOR. You can never guarantee that some part of the network is falsifying SSL certificates and logging your data.
 
For those interested in trying out Tor, they do offer USB portable browser apps that should work for most people.

Good for getting around web filters at your work or university, though I would never check my email or visit a banking/money site while connected to TOR. You can never guarantee that some part of the network is falsifying SSL certificates and logging your data.

also if your work finds out your using TOR you'll probably be fired for using proxys
 

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Tor is certainly not some a honeypot. If it was, all the pedos and drug sellers would have been busted a long time ago and so would all the server providers. It's not like silk road and what not doesn't work.

I think they would generally do something like this to data browse. They wouldn't do this just to set up a sting, but they might use the data routes to help direct people setting up stings, or maybe just to have high access to something that people think is a secure data transfer network. Getting in on the ground floor, as it were.
 
I think they would generally do something like this to data browse. They wouldn't do this just to set up a sting, but they might use the data routes to help direct people setting up stings, or maybe just to have high access to something that people think is a secure data transfer network. Getting in on the ground floor, as it were.

tor doesn't work that way.
 
tor doesn't work that way.

...go on.


edit: I'm not saying that it'd be something as simple as node riding, like they did with phone and internet traffic. But seeding some kind of 'TOR user' tag into the network, slowly building a map of usage, or something. People are actively trying to hack the thing, anyway.

I could also see them doing this if it could help them build their own sort of similar network. They're definitely involved for a reason.

(I'm hurt that you didn't respond back, Pandaman. Unless you were preparing for 10am, in which case, I understand.)
 
TOR is safe. Theres a zero percent chance you'll find anything illegal unless you actively search it and even then it's not easy to find, you gotta go deeper. The worst of the internet is very deep in very, very obscure places. Also you probably would need a password to even get connected to the sites. Like I said TOR is safe.
 
I wouldn't say its impossible to see rotten stuff unless you're looking for it. A lot of seemingly innocuous Chans and such are spammed with all kinds of stuff.
 
I wouldn't say its impossible to see rotten stuff unless you're looking for it. A lot of seemingly innocuous Chans and such are spammed with all kinds of stuff.



yeah, basic internet instincts are enough to not click on anything bad on TOR and it's more likely you'd be password blocked anyway.
 
you sure TOR is running? Sounds like what happens when you don't have it running. It's possible the URL was changed too maybe?

I downloaded the browser bundle and put it on a USB stick. As far as I could tell, that was just one icon (the onion thing), and when I double click that, it opens a small window that goes through a connection process. It succeeds with that, and then the TOR version of Firefox (blackish globe icon) launches and it says I am connected to TOR.

so if that all sounds like I'm doing it right, then I dunno. Maybe SR was just down last night or something. Not sure.
 
I use it to bypass censorship while in China. I know you can use it to do these other things, but I didn't know it it was more well known for enabling child porn than actually bypassing censorship? :/
 
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