On Saturday, October 12, 2019, 06:51:52 PM PDT, coderman <coderman@protonmail.com> wrote: ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Saturday, October 12, 2019 8:02 PM, grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> wrote:
... There were relay boxes on offer in the past, not sure if still today. There are boxes on offer today providing local proxy into tor.
most of these were horrible; some were outright broken (e.g. trivial proxy bypass vulns) some years back i helped write a proposal for an easy to use Tor enforcing router; this would rely on a "Tor Director" application to make setup and administration easy and idiomatic for the platform users were accustomed to. main drawback with this approach is bespoke manufacture; it would be interesting to revisit this approach with rpi4 or other plentiful commodity platform.
I should clarify: I'm not advocating TOR itself: I'm advocating a networked anonymization system, at least vaguely like TOR, but with the additional features that have been talked about for many years. Say, with automatic chaff generation, arbitrarily-long hops (256 hops? 65,536 hops? An even larger power-of-2 hops?), etc. Actually IMPLEMENTED and running. Not merely talked about. (This talks about improvements to TOR. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/03/tor_ravamp/ I'm more interested in "proposed improvements that have been ignored for years.) Who do we blame for not having this? Well, we can start by blaming the designers and implementors of TOR, and the people who fund it and thus impede it from improving. That's a good start. But, why don't we also blame all those people who claim they hate TOR, or at least how it's run? After all, they've had two decades to implement an improvement. Now that they have general-purpose hardware microcontrollers, like Raspberry Pi, I figure the main difficulty is designing the software, building 1000+ units, and finding 1000+ volunteers to host one. If such a thing existed, I would probably host one, too. Hey, it's work, but I think we agree it should be done. I just found this, written 2 years ago. https://www.raspberrypi.org/magpi/tor-router/ Or, from last year: https://www.linux.com/news/turn-your-raspberry-pi-tor-relay-node/ Why not implement an entirely new anonymization network? Jim Bell