[system33-]

It’s then best we’ve got for achieving actually meaningful privacy and anonymity. It has a huge body of research behind it that is regularly ignored by those coming up with sexy or off-the-cuff alternatives.

It’s the most popular so it gets the most attention: from academics, criminals, law enforcement, journalists, …

[beeflet]

Why not just have greater number of relays by default? Internet bandwidth tends to increase over time, and the odds of this correlation attack are roughly proportional to the attacker's share of relays to the power of the number of relays used.

So latency issues permitting, you would expect the default number of relays to increase over time to accommodate increases in attacker sophistication. I don't think many would mind waiting for a page to load for a minute if it increased privacy by 100x or 1000x.

[system33-]

If you’re advocating for a bigger network… we need more relay operators. Can’t wave a magic wand. There’s like 8000 relays. Haven’t looked in a while.

Or if you were arguing for increasing the number of relays in a circuit, that doesn’t increase security. It’s like one of the OG tor research papers deciding on 3. Bad guy just needs the first and the last. Middle irrelevant.

[basedrum]

it was used by Snowden to leak documents...

[AyyEye]

Snowden got caught.

[yupyupyups]

>It’s then best we’ve got for achieving actually meaningful privacy and anonymity

...while being practical.

One could argue that there is i2p. But i2p is slow, a little bit harder to use, and from what I can remember, doesn't allow you to easily browse the clearnet (regular websites).

[appendix-rock]

These sort of “Tor evangelism” comments are so tiring, frankly. There are quite a few like it in this thread, in response to…not people poo-pooing Tor, or throwing the baby out with the bathwater, rather making quite level-headed and reasonable claims as to the shortcomings and limitations of the network / protocol / service / whatever.

One should be able to make these quite reasonable determinations about how easy it’d be to capture and identify Tor traffic without a bunch of whataboutism and “it’s still really good though, ok!” replies which seek to unjustifiably minimise valid concerns because one feels the need to…go on and bat for the project that they feel some association with, or something.

The self-congratulatory cultiness of it only makes me quite suspicious of those making these comments, and if anything further dissuades me from ever committing any time or resources to the project.

[llm_trw]

The issue is that the people making 'level headed' claims have read none of the literature and their mathematical ability seems to end at multiplying numbers together.

It sounds reasonable to anyone who hasn't read the papers, to anyone that has these comments are so wrong that you can't even start explaining what's going wrong without a papers worth of explanation that the people don't read.