On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 04:23:48AM -0000, toru...@tormail.net wrote: > i believe there is a real need for secure communications but as a new user > to tor it seems the common entry points to the network are rife with > criminal activity. > > the torproject website lists users as friends and family, military, > business owners etc - use cases that make sense to me, but i've yet to > find any stories or ancedontal evidence to suggest this is really the > case. instead i find core.onion linking to "adult" content that has > little to do with adults and "market sites" that deal with illegal trade > in weapons and drugs. > > so far it has me wondering if tor is really used for the humanitarian > purposes the technology has the potential of aiding. i would really > appreciate hearing real stories and highlights of how has helped in the > use cases torproject lists.
You might like https://torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en https://blog.torproject.org/blog/we-need-your-good-tor-stories Really, getting good stories of Tor successes is tricky, because if Tor is doing its job, nobody notices. I know a lot of people who have really interesting Tor success stories and have no interest in telling the world who they are and how they managed (until that moment when everybody is reading about them, that is) to stay safe. Still, there are a bunch of other stories out there that haven't been documented as well. For example, I really like Nasser's story about his experiences in Mauritania: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/22427/page4/ I think I understand one of your confusions though, when you say "the common entry points to the network". You're thinking about hidden services, which are not Tor's main use case (Tor's main use case is accessing the rest of the Internet safely). Hidden services have gotten less broad attention from the Tor user base, since most people who install Tor have a website in mind like twitter or indymedia that they want to visit safely. Some good use cases that we've seen for hidden services in particular include: - I know people (for example, in countries that have been undergoing revolutions lately) who run popular blogs but their blogs kept getting knocked offline by, well, criminals. The common blogging software they used (like Wordpress) couldn't stand up to the ddos attacks and breakins. The solution was to split the blog into a public side, which is static html and has no logins, and a private side for posting, which is only reachable over a Tor hidden service. Now their blog works again and they're reaching their audiences. And as a bonus, the nice fellow hosting the private side for him doesn't need to let people know where it is, and even if they figure it out, the nice fellow hosting it doesn't have any IP addresses to hand over or lose. - Whistleblowing websites want to provide documents from a platform that is hard for upset corporations or governments to censor. See e.g. http://globaleaks.org/ - Google for 'indymedia fbi seize'. When Indymedia offers a hidden service version of their website, censoring organizations don't know which data centers to bully into handing over the hardware. - Data retention laws in Europe (and soon in the US too at this rate) threaten to make centralized chat networks vulnerable to social network analysis (step one, collect all the data; step two, get broken into by corporations, criminals, external governments, you name it; step three comes identity theft, stalking, targeted scam jobs, etc etc). What if you had a chat network where all the users were on hidden services by default? Now there's no easy central point to learn who's talking to who and when. Building one and making it usable turns out to be hard. But good thing we have this versatile tool here as a building block. How's that for a start? It is certainly the case that we (Tor) spend most of our time making the technology better, and not so much of our time figuring out how to market it and change the world's perception on whether being safe online is worthwhile. Please help. :) --Roger _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
