Views on TOR

As we learned in the last couple of weeks, those who have sworn an oath to protect us have decided that using any kind of encryption thwarts their intention to protect us.
We learned that using the anonymity enhancing software TOR makes you look bad in the five eyes.

Funny enough, like the internet itself, according to Wikipedia, TOR had some sponsorship by the U.S. government and then became its own project.

In many media reports, TOR has been given the attributes of 'secretive' and 'dark'.

We are willing to bet that Susan B. Anthony dollar that people would say "TOR" when you tell them it can make your browsing more anonymous and then ask where terrorist web sites would be found.

Try it.

Unlike with all previous bets, we will cover shipping and handling for the Susan B. this time.

The fear industry will never tell you the truth: TOR is so much less criminal than your neat little daily internet. Is this statement surprises you, think again.

For starters: The big bad filesharing operations either don't run under TOR or are not anonymous.
Your average TOR server does not hide from the public. The IP addresses of the servers are displayed in the network map for the whole world to see.

One important aspect of TOR is this: your surfing becomes less comfortable than on the neat net. There is much less bandwidth, downloads become as slow as on the normal Deutsche Telekom connection once their throttleing kicks in.

Even simple things like login in to your email become work. At best, you will need to enter a secondary email address. At the intermediate level, you get a captcha that is so f***ing hard to solve that you start cussing, at worst they won't let you in at all.

That is difficult for spooks to understand.

If they cannot understand, it must mean it is dangerous. Plus, from what we have learned in the past weeks, logging in to their classified systems is less work than using TOR.

Users around the world rely on TOR because they need protection from their government. Their lives depend on it.

Bogus patent applications that at best stifle companies, at worst kill people, they do not use TOR, they are sent as password protected zip files through regular email.

Those terrorist websites?  We are not being told, but they are not under TOR.

Other unsavory things commonly mentioned in connection with sensationalizing coverage, like child abuse, are actually being fought by many, many TOR users.
Just talk to child abuse experts.

The past two weeks have, in the view of TheEditor, been a striking, shocking example of major media failures: The social contract looks more and more like a bad cell phone service plan where they keep changing the fine print on people. The evil thing is, you don't know because the fine print is classified information.

So, we run an internal TOR relay whenever we feel like it.

In addition to curiosity and to savoring that geekness which somehow passed us by in our teens, there is another, deeper reason for donating internet breathing space (or "bandwidth").

If I cannot do it, the paper that says "For exceptionally meritorious achievements..." becomes worthless.

Thank you for your understanding.

Surf responsibly.