On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 05:24:28AM +0300, Maxim Kammerer wrote:

On Thu, Apr 5, 2012 at 04:15, Ted Smith <tedks@riseup.net> wrote:

...

(Also, have you missed the mail *on this list* from .mil domains?)

There is Paul Syverson, who works at NRL, if I am not mistaken; did I miss anyone else?

We created Tor to protect military communications. Much like other things invented at NRL (e.g., the joystick controller for remote control---patented in 1923! or GPS) it also has widespread civilian use. For most of those, the civilian, business, or other government use is icing on the cake of the purpose that prompted research on them. For some, e.g., IFF (identification friend-or-foe) their development into civilian use (ATCRBS, the air traffic control radar beacon system) importantly facilitates military use of the shared space. For onion routing, we argued publicly right from the start that the diversity of users was an essential element in effective use of the technology---even way back when we were just calling our systems onion routing, rather than _the_ onion routing (Tor) to distinguish from instances of onion routing developed elsewhere. As you can see, I'm not averse to touting these creations. But I am a researcher who does publicly published research in this area and whose work largely benefits from visibility. As Roger and others have pointed out earlier in this thread, people who rely on Tor to protect sensitive communications are rarely going to be happy to have anything revealed about their usage. You are simply not going to hear from (most of) those people, and you are definitely not going to get a representative sample of such use. At best you are going to be lucky to have anecdotal examples or even just anecdotal claims of usage from which to extrapolate. You seem to be asking for a statistically accurate demographic study of all users. But I am sure there are whole classes of users who don't want even their class of activity on Tor, much less their specific activity, known. I have no idea what classes, but that just makes sense. And on a more individual level, for every stalking victim who both managed to connect to Andrew and decided to trust him to help her protect herself online there are ??? others who did not have that opportunity or were unsure enough about trust to not reveal. (Of course ideally anyone regardless of technical background should know about the benefits of Tor and how to use it for their needs without having to talk to Andrew or someone. Let's not get into any of those issues.) A well-designed user study will tell us something interesting about Tor users. What it will definitely not do is give us a representative distribution of Tor users by purpose (and as already touched on usage demographics, e.g., by country can be significantly dynamic). And inferring user distributions from traffic distributions in studies that are methodologically controversial is not helpful. If that's all we've got for now, then that's all we've got. But we should be very careful what we infer from it. aloha, Paul _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE