This email is shared from a place of forthrightness (and hope).

   [1]https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37

   Just to add, I suspect the reason that the state of public anonymity
   tools is not stronger is that the existing international powerholders,
   whose power could be reduced by widespread accessible anonymity, take
   diverse action to slow the release and hinder the effective use of the
   research.

   The way to make things change would be for people like us to agree to
   work together on forging one right thing in a development community,
   and use tools of both interpersonal mediation and software development
   to bring the result to happen by force of collective determination. It
   might help if everyone kept themselves more anonymous, collaborated in
   private as well as in public, and supported people who ran into
   personal issues so as to resist disruption and keep the work moving
   forward.
   On Fri, Sep 4, 2020, 5:49 PM David Stainton
   <[2]notifications@github.com> wrote:

     It's too late for this discussion. IPFS has failed to embrace the
     concept of free Tor integration from volunteer developers.

     That having been said, anonymity is a synonym for traffic analysis
     resistance; that is to say, even encrypted traffic can be analyzed
     for the metadata it leaks. Tor is the very weakest of the existing
     designs for anonymous communication networks however it is the most
     widely used whereas the other designs from academia have not had
     much field testing; such as: mix networks, dcnets, verified shuffles
     and other things can be used to form anonymous communication
     networks such as private information retrieval, oblivious ram, multi
     party computation etc.

     Tor is trivially broken by any sufficient global adversary by means
     of timing correlation whereas mixnets are not. There are many other
     ways to break Tor.

     Anonymity aka traffic analysis resistance is not yet a popular
     security feature because these designs are in some respects ahead of
     their time... just like not every software project embraces
     deterministic builds. Just because your white middle class platitude
     doesn't allow you to understand why people in high risk situations
     might need these things doesn't mean they are not needed. In fact,
     in dealing with such folks I find the easiest way to impart the
     importance to them is to describe military scenarios, e.g. if you
     were in the military, overseas, you might actually be interested in
     traffic analysis resistance.

     Think about a future brighter than Tor! Think about mixnets, hybrid
     networks, dcnets and so on. Monoculture is death. Why is Tor the
     only successful anonymity network? And to a lesser degree I2p?
     Although the I2p observation is less valid because it's design is so
     similar to Tor in that it can easily be broken by timing correlation
     from a sufficiently global adversary.

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References

   1. https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37
   2. mailto:notifications@github.com
   3. https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37#issuecomment-687407153
   4. https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AACEIIKJAJVQXDV267SEBU3SEFOGDANCNFSM4BOOQVOA