On 01/11/15 08:07, jim bell wrote:
From: grarpamp <grarpamp@gmail.com> To: "cypherpunks@cpunks.org" <cypherpunks@cpunks.org> Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2015 11:41 PM Subject: Re: Bitcoin Halloween... A Dangerous Idea... They're Terrified We'll Use It
On Sat, Oct 31, 2015 at 11:16 PM, jim bell <jdb10987@yahoo.com> wrote:
Generally, I'm not interested in "upgrading" anything. I just want things to WORK. Should I have been able to access the site using my browser?
Onions should never resolve, so the answer is no. I wish I understood what you just said. Jim Bell
Please accept my apologies if I'm teaching granny to suck eggs, being trolled, shit like that but I'm going to assume minimal knowledge of this... Basically, you have a bunch of tools designed to hide your communications when using the internet. This particular set of tools has at it's core, The Onion Router (Tor) which passes your internet communications via many different proxies using multiple layers of encryption so that none of the proxies in the middle of this chain can identify the source and destination of the connection. Tor can be used to hide your communications when looking at normal websites such as www.cryptome.com but this carries a risk. Any of the proxies can be monitored and using traffic correlation you can be identified by comparing the communications entering Tor and exiting Tor (to reach the website). To avoid this, you can use Tor to only access Hidden web servers so that your traffic never leaves the Tor network, making the traffic correlation techniques much harder to do. These hidden web servers are only visible in the Tor network and their web addresses end in .onion Hence, people referring to onions :) So, if you wish to view the content on the hidden servers like the one coderman linked to then you need access to the Tor network. The Tor project make a modified version of the Firefox web browser available for download and install that gives a simple way to access Tor without having to do much messing about with your computer. It also, has a modified configuration to reduce the amount of private information you leak when using it. Information from the horses mouth: https://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en Download the Tor Browser: https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en The quality of information available at the Tor link will far surpass what I have just written and you should assume small but possibly devastating inaccuracies in my description above :) Sorry for the long post but I couldn't think of a quick way of writing it if you haven't come across Tor before. There are also other similar systems: i2p, freenet but Tor seems to be the most popular. Something to weigh up though is that Tor was created by the US Navy and the project still receives US Government funding so you should probably bear this in mind when using it although reading more information on the Tor Project's website may or may not reduce feelings of discomfort that come from knowing where the funding comes from. Cheers, oshwm