Nostr Web Client

I noticed that you mentioned I2P and not Tor. Personally I believe that Tor has fundamental advantages over I2P. I believe that one of the greatest advantages of Tor is how much choice it gives to the people who participate in the network. Someone can use Tor without relaying other people's traffic, and node operators can opt in or out of being an exit node, even picking and choosing what kind of traffic and clearnet destinations one will allow the user to visit through you.

Not every user has the same values or OpSec. Some people live in countries where running a Tor node is illegal, even if they can't know what encrypted traffic they are relaying. I believe that I2P's choice to have everyone relay other people's traffic is a big problem.

Also, the small number of relays that allow for browsing the clearnet is a problem.

What do you think?

ede3d957... 2mo ago

I think it depends on your usecase. Tor is normie tech. My whole family runs it in the background.

It's good. But if you are not using onion addresses it is compromised. You need to exclude spy nodes from Germany and Netherlands that make up >50% of the network and unfortunately they provide the highest speed.

Use it as much as you can. Ask people to provide you with onion addresses!

Then people in opppresive regimes should look into v2ray.

And in general I'd recommend a VPN on your router to separate ISP from your Tor usage patterns.

Finally you could even use i2p on top of Tor. It has less shortcomings and it's only issue are low speeds because usage is still low, but it's preferable if you want higher degrees of anonymity.

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Discussion

Scoundrel 2mo ago

Your family sounds based.

Even if 50% of Tor nodes were run by the same organization, and even if that organization attempted to deanonymize them, that would still result in only 13% of 3 hop Tor circuits allowing users to be deanonymized. If you are really worried then your push should be to increase the number of hops in Tor circuits. Trying to identify and exclude nodes you think might be malicious is completely misunderstanding how Tor provides anonymity to its users. What grows faster? 2^x or x^2?

But I have yet to see convincing evidence that ANYONE is capable of tracing Tor circuits, especially with the most up to date version of the software. I would like to hear where you are getting your information from, if you don't kind sharing.

I don't have time to say more.

ede3d957... 2mo ago

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.

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.

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.

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.

ede3d957... 2mo ago

Nit that I am aware of. But it should.

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.