Replying to Avatar Edward Snowden

I wouldn't actually use me as the model for "paranoid user support," because my opsec is pretty casual these days relative to ten years back. I'd say a standard "reasonably private without being a pain" setup would be to connect to Nostr through the Tor Browser (included by default) running on the Whonix VM images. The Tor Browser by itself is probably enough for most people, but Whonix layer helps prevent network leaks in the event of malware or a misbehaving app, for those for whom those are relevant concerns.

Snort.social isn't (yet) working on Tor (without disabling private browsing mode), but I think they have a pull request up on their git, so hopefully soon. I only mentioned it because I saw it during testing and liked the UX. I'm using iris.to right now through the TBB, and it works fine. Only thing I've noticed missing is the NIP-05 profile field.

I don't really *need* a nip05 yet, because my key has a memorable prefix that's not (yet) trivially brutable. Will add one eventually -- and FWIW I really appreciate the offers from everybody who already reached out to help on that.

Realistically, I think 90% of potential users won't becoming from desktop clients, they'll be coming from mobile, so I think the real key is to build mobile apps that have a checkbox to route their traffic through the local tor instance. IIRC, 127.0.0.1:9050
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/dev/fd0 2y ago

Amethyst app works with Orbot (VPN mode). Posting this from an Android phone using Tor.

Overall I agree privacy could be improved a lot at protocol level and in different nostr clients. I had written a post about nostr privacy recently that youihjt find interesting: https://consentonchain.github.io/blog/posts/nostr-privacy/

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Edward Snowden 2y ago

The problem with Orbot's VPN mode is it doesn't support chaining with another (real) VPN, since Android only natively permits one VPN at a time. This is a problem for users in places where the Tor network is blocked (and Tor Bridges / obfuscated relays are, too, or are unreliable), because you need an initial hop outside of the Great Firewall in order to reliably link to Tor.