Replying to ede3d957...

You are right in general in regards to (not) exclude certain nodes, but because there is ? a speed component to the circuits, one often ends up with servers from Germany and Netherlands only.

Onion links have 6 hops by default. Timing attacks are a thing. That's why it is good to have a router VPN between you and Tor.
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Scoundrel 2mo ago

What does a VPN do that incresing the number of hops wouldn't do better? And do you have any source for your claims that 50% of Tor nodes are compromised, or that timing attacks are currently present and identifying any Tor users?

Also, have you considered the possibility of increasing the default number of Tor hops without relying on onion links? By the way, onion links should not be treated as having 6 hops, since the owner of the onion site knows 3 of the hops and because site owners are treated as malicious in Tor's threat model.

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ede3d957... 2mo ago

ISP will know that you use Tor if you don't put a VPN in between. VPN's a much more commonly used so it raises less suspicion.

Not saying that 50% are compromised. Just saying that > 50% are in just two jurisdictions that make information exchange likely.

Recently DNM have been taken out by German police.

More hops would be nice, especially since overall Tor speed grew by a big factor in the last 3 years.

Need to look into how onion nodes view the network. Which makes me think that i2p is even more necessary than I thought first.

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Scoundrel 2mo ago

Doesn't the Tor client make an effort to diversify node jurisdictions? Three hops; two problematic jurisdictions. Seems good to me.

Also, people on the darknet are always getting caught. As a rule of thumb, it's pretty safe to assume it's due to independent infosec mistakes. There have been dozens of cases of the media making a big deal about a Tor user getting caught, and every time more information emerges we find that they made numerous infosec mistakes that had nothing to do with Tor.

ed
ede3d957... 2mo ago

Nit that I am aware of. But it should.

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Scoundrel 2mo ago

I mean, if it was always choosing the fastest connection,it would obviouslh just connect to the same node 3 times so that the signal doesn't have to bounce around the world.

By the way, I came up with a scenario where excluding German nodes could end up compromising a person's identity.

Suppose someone has a personal Nostr account that they sometimes access through a Nostr relay with a .onion address. And suppose this person also sells firearms on the darknet in a country where the state does not recognize a right for citizens to bear arms.

What this person doesn't realize is that the government currently has access to both Tor services. Over a long period of time, the government observes that across the two sites, there are exactly two users whose third node is never a German node. The firearms seller on the DNM, and the one user on their Nostr account. So they track down the author of the Nostr account based on some selfies they took, and have them executed. Suddenly the firearms sales stop.