Tor Stinks re Traffic Analysis and Sybil (as do other networks)

[John Young]

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 at 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.