Critique of Tor applies equally, perhaps moreso, to the whole Internet for monetization, technology, personnel, administration, operation, funding, seducing the public, NGOs, dissent. So too, to crypto, anonymization, cypherpunks. Perennial question is how to sort through the tsunami of claims and counterclaims, sponsored hacks, slyly appealing "free" SM, search engines, FOIA enterprises, Wayback and Wikipedia, paid and volunteer informants and agents, hot shit mail lists and get-it-now podcasts, star-studded conferences and outlaw-celebrity lectures, incarcerated Julians and Jeremys, fans and evermore fans of unexamined underwriters. Has there ever been more people eagerly declaring in public their likes and hatreds, convictions and doubts, hoping to gain advantage over other people by pretense and deception. Actually, yes, there has been since talking, singing, dancing, education, civilization was invented to entrap prey. Prey quickly learned from predators to reverse the panopticon. Usually by offering their gullible, edible kids, cohorts and mates as irresistable bait to fatten the enemy into overconfidence, sloth, braggrdy, imagined supremacy. Tor, like Trump, is hardly novel in this suicidalism, nor the crusading, diabolical internet of everything data. At 06:39 PM 11/23/2019, you wrote:
On 11/23/2019 04:23 PM, Punk-Stasi 2.0 wrote:
On Sat, 23 Nov 2019 15:39:55 -0700 Mirimir <mirimir@riseup.net> wrote:
The villains here are writers of the Tor Project website. They bullshit users, overselling Tor. Why, I don't know. Maybe it's all a honeypot. Or maybe they're just idiots.
Notice that they get paid as long as tor exists. So even if tor was not a honeypot, and they are not idiots, they still have a fundamental incentive to oversell it. Their paychecks.
Yeah, good point.
After those FOIA documents came out, I lost all respect for the Tor Project. I get how conflicted they were. Needing government support. Keeping the cops happy. Maybe having their jobs threatened. But selling out is selling out, no matter how many excuses one has.
Also, syverson and co. are complicit in overselling tor,
despite the fact that their papers for the 'technical intelligentsia' spell out the limitations.
Agreed.
I've wondered whether it's just that they need lots of users for cover traffic. That _was_ a major factor in opening Tor to the public, instead of restricting it to government users. But that seems unlikely, now, given that the NSA etc could easily run enough bots on hacked servers.
My guess is that the main reason for them to get as many users as they can is to justify funding. Hell, maybe they even get a percentage of funding directly proportional to number of users/network size.
Makes sense.