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is tor safe to use ?
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is tor safe to use ?

Is tor safe to use this days ?

What comes to mind is only:

  • Silk Road was closed by FBI

  • Financially supported by USA government

Please write what do you think about it and anything else what you know about tor ?

Thanks!

is tor safe to use ?
  1. Yes, I'm sure about it.38 votes
    1. Yes, probably.
      36.84%
    2. No, nothing free is safe.
      63.16%

Comments

  • PwnerPwner Member
    edited April 2014

    I forgot who posted this before in another thread, but it couldn't hurt to put up again.

    http://lmgtfy.com/?q=fbi+running+tor

  • Tor is... well... um... never used it, because I don't feel that I am restricted/need to hide from things (for now).

  • said: Silk Road was closed by FBI

    This was not due to Tor, but the stupidity and ignorance of people. Running out-of-date software in a non restricted environment (Tails) will always be a risk.

    said: Financially supported by USA government

    Not a bad thing, Tor was designed that even if the government hosted and monitored Tor nodes, safety would not be compromised. The source is open and many paranoid developers have looked into it.

    Tor may be the safest anonymous network in the world. Although a great alternative is i2p. Hell, run i2p within Tor.

  • MaouniqueMaounique Host Rep, Veteran
    edited April 2014

    It depends what you need it for and how you are using it. If you want to use it over https, it is reasonably safe, if you want to hide your IP, it is reasonably safe.
    Is it bulletproof? No. Is if fool-proof? No. You need to know your stuff if you want privacy online and if you are dealing with stuff which can land you in jail or killed.
    For criminals it is much safer to use hacked zPanel boxes or those with changeme/12345678 as root password, for the regular citizen, that is a bit difficult. There is no absolute safety for anyone, you are always dealing with a risk, it must be worth it in the first place and you must be reasonably sure your tracks are covered most of the time and when they are not, you cannot be linked to that activity without a lot of trouble.
    You see, the agencies, are usually not after criminals, but after "dangerous elements" which are spreading "hate" such as discussing taboo subjects or instigating to human rights and democracy. That will mean restraining their power and they cannot cope with that, coming back to the old ways when you needed some evidence for warrants is not conceivable in this day and age, as such, you need to make sure you are not interesting for them by using free tools to hide your "interesting" activity in forums and supporting the freedom of speech, but you must also understand that they will usually pick the low hanging fruit, it is much easier to contact google/microsoft/yahoo to get your emails and your phone company to listen to your calls, breaking encryption and doing elaborate attacks on tor to track you down is much more difficult, if they were in for hard work they would have been happy with the old ways which involved some work.
    So:

    1. Host your own mail, only use it over smtps/https/pop3s and encrypt the storage, preferably host it at home and pipe it through some VPS you own because dynamic ranges or residential ones are usually rejected by providers, but if you only need it for your group, that wont matter as you wont be using any block lists.
    2. Host your own pbx and use encryption all the time, dont go over public lines if you dont want your phone being recorded.
    3. Use tools such as Tor when you absolutely have to use the public internet, otherwise, there is always freenet with mail, boards, sites, file transfer and more such tools will be created, just convince your friends to start using it and your group is much safer than with Tor.
    4. Help the network grow beyond reasonable tapping and help yourself along with everyone else. FBI might be running Tor and some exits, but many relays are run by you and me as well as entry points, so they can see what gets out, but not really where it gets in and where it travels through, unless you are using Tor to connect to an end point they control and use your data, such as gmail/hotmail/yahoo/internet banking/any place where you use your real name and address. Even then it is not really easy to make sure it was you in the other places, but you should have different identities for different purposes.
    5. Use specialized VMs for special activities, such as a totally open source system and with all traffic encrypted and passed through Tor, this way you will greatly reduce the risk of leaking DNS traffic and other things (btw, host your own DNS). Encrypt the file system, including the swap at installation with very long passphrases and keep it shutdown unless you are there using it.
    6. Always use totally open source browsers such as iceweasel in privacy mode and with https. Some sites have to use cookies and other will use them to track you, but it wont be of any help if everything is cleaned up at shutdown. Faking the user-agent will also confuse some tracking systems but in some very limited situations might scramble the page (hopefully that is less and less common now)
  • ca1nca1n Member

    well informed response
    ...I think that counts as an answer (:

  • Yes, it's safe. If you can, please run a TOR relay or limited exit - you might even get a free tshirt! :D

    Also hosting your email is a very good idea if you care about your privacy, i have my personal mail running from home with a static IP - backup MX going to encrypted dedi. Using stuff like PGP for email will also help!

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    I got my 2 T-Shirts for running 6 Relays over years :D

  • Infinity580 said: I got my 2 T-Shirts for running 6 Relays over years :D

    I just set a couple up and the nodes are pulling 3 MB/s, do you throttle or cap the relays?

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran

    1MB/s because more would take big ammounts of CPU and i have bigger risks to get suspended.

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