On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Andrew Lewman <and...@torproject.is> wrote: > The Tor users page is based on a number of people who have told us how > they use Tor. They didn't want to be named, so the profiles are > anonymous and aggregated.
Sure, that's why the “Tor users” page is more or less a rewritten and expanded version of the original overview on Free Heaven [1], which is a simple promotional writeup about people being able to circumvent firewalls and hide their IPs, with the lone exception of something that looks like an NRL-initiated internal military case study. Did you write that page? > However, since you want named users willing to put themselves at risk, > here they are https://people.torproject.org/~andrew/tor-user-stories/ I don't want named users — I would be completely fine with anonymous accounts. Anyway, I went over the stories in that directory (with the exception of the PDF, which is inaccessible, and the source of that PDF, linked from the Tor blog, is inaccessible as well), and they are all about either (1) (mostly) activists circumventing a filter, or (2) (rarely) activists hiding one's IP. Boring, especially considering that most activists greatly overestimate their importance or attention from authorities. Nothing about hidden services or intelligence gathering, nothing about commercial espionage, not even about anonymous blogging (not surprising — I am yet to see a popular blogger who is not an attention whore). Interestingly, there are a couple of non-trivial entries on “Tor users” page, like the US IBB entry — that's right there US foreign intelligence supporting Tor usage by subversive elements in countries of interest. I didn't spend too much time searching for that — did they fund Tor? I think you should expand on this on the page, since it shows some technical credibility. By the way, those stories suggest that no one actually needs anything beyond the most basic anonymity set reduction — it's just an attractive R&D topic because you can make small incremental improvements. > I ask again, because I want the answer to improve us: >> > How would you have us promote Tor? Well, it's not really my job, but I think that you should focus less on propaganda, and focus more on getting users involved who will then expand the network instead of just using it as a proxy. Make everyone a relay (even if low-bandwidth relays are not useful, and even if there are theoretical issues — solve the issues instead) and have a hidden service address by default. Work with file sharing software developers to have a one-click setup of P2P sharing via Tor. Make an easy interface for publishing files or simple sites on user's .onion host. Don't invent use cases, because users have their own (which you don't like and hence ignore) — facilitate network expansion which will actually bring in new use cases. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20051110053619/http://tor.freehaven.net/overview.html -- Maxim Kammerer Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
