Bitcoin Halloween... A Dangerous Idea... They're Terrified We'll Use It

oshwm oshwm at openmailbox.org
Sun Nov 1 01:20:28 PST 2015



On 01/11/15 08:07, jim bell wrote:
> 
>       From: grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com>
>  To: "cypherpunks at cpunks.org" <cypherpunks at 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 at 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

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