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![]() | TorSearch was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 19 October 2022 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Tor (network). The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here. |
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![]() | The contents of the Portable Tor page were merged into Tor (network) on 9 November 2013. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
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Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 11:31, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
"An extract of a Top Secret appraisal by the National Security Agency (NSA) characterized Tor as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting"."
"As of 2012, 80% of The Tor Project's $2M annual budget came from the United States government,"
hahaha. oh dear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.233.16.6 ( talk) 08:12, 7 October 2014
Hello,
I'm definitely late with my response, but I'm adding this comment for posterity, as this isn't the first time I've read something like this.
Sponsors are publicly listed: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/
Here is an excerpt from the text of this page:
The variety of people who use Tor is actually part of what makes it so secure. Tor hides you among the other users on the network, so the more populous and diverse the user base for Tor is, the more your anonymity will be protected.
If you develop something especially for "covert" operations, it will be quickly fingerprinted and attributed to that group. What they need is repudiation, so it makes sense that the more users have access to that tool, the easier it is to blend in. The same argument can be made for Ghidra (originally developed by the NSA) or even SELinux. I do remember reading about this somewhere, but can't figure out where at the moment.
Anything can devolve into conspiracy territory, but at some point in the (digital) world someone has to be trusted, there is no other way around it. Personally, while nothing is perfect, I trust the Tor Project and what they are doing.
Kind regards,
IrrationalBeing ( talk) 20:03, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: Moved ( non-admin closure) ( t · c) buidhe 15:50, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
Tor (anonymity network) → Tor (network) – simpler disambiguation term Deku-shrub ( talk) 22:01, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
First the trivial: As of this day, link [41] (Cox, Joseph (1 February 2016). "Study Claims Dark Web Sites Are Most Commonly Used for Crimes". Retrieved 20 March 2016.) referring to the graph to Tor usage is broken, and thus the traffic statistics presented are called into question.
So far as I can tell, there are now numerous claims being made about the utility and cost of ToR. One of the best papers I've seen that isn't cited yet is a 2020 work by Jardine et al: The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries; Eric Jardine, Andrew M. Lindner, Gareth Owenson; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2020, 117 (50) 31716-31721; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2011893117
On the other hand, there is a well known quote from a blog from the CEO of Cloudflare indicating that some 94% of requests they were seeing in 2016 was malware. See https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/. That quote is a bit long in the tooth as well.
These claims are not completely out of alignment with one another, because of the methodologies used. The Jardine work in particular compares in network versus out of network access, while of course Cloudflare is looking only at its clear site access.
My suggestion is that the controversy over benefits versus drawbacks be called out in a bit more articulate fashion, a'la "here are purported benefits... here are purported risks..." That would also more clearly demonstrate balance to the reader. Pigdog234 ( talk) 09:54, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
This needs to be investigated. Wikipedia is seriously abusing this API, and I suppose even logs ips, considering somehow only less protected ips are blocked by real people, and others are just blocked by Tor Block extension of wikimedia engine on github. I will propose to stop Onionoo to Tor Project. Valery Zapolodov ( talk) 18:05, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
Saw this reverted edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tor_(network)&diff=1092140671&oldid=1092139313
About this--back in the day, pre-2015 I believe, Tor was written as TOR and did stand for "The Onion Router". Today, it is spelled "Tor", but the acronym is still valid. M4sugared ( talk) 22:30, 10 June 2022 (UTC)
So I haven't bothered discussing this since the above discussion because it's mostly been a relatively harmless issue, but because of recent edits, I'm going to reiterate that Tor is not an acronym, and never was. The etymology of it is "The Onion Router", yes, but it never actually stood for that per se (hence "Tor" and not "TOR"). The fact it is commonly referred to as such is an error, but one common enough that I could see why people would think otherwise, and why it wasn't a huge deal to be in the lead. But unlike Tor the idea or Tor the network, it is absolutely unambiguous that the software itself was never called "The Onion Router". You will not find that name in its README, or its source code, because from the original publication of the Tor paper, they never called that code base anything other than Tor (well, more accurately, they call it "tor", or "little-t-tor", to distinguish it from all those other things, but I'm not going to bother disputing that spelling). I've changed the existing cites on the issue to a book published by MIT press with a quote discussing this misconception. Hopefully that's enough to settle the issue? If need be, I can pull more sources for this, but I do want to emphasize that typically reputable sources outside the space get this wrong all the time, and I kind of suspect that misconception itself originates from rushed journalists reading this very article, which is why a sourced book from an academic publisher is better than the tertiary news sites we would typically be okay to rely on. - Tga ( talk) 04:58, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
I added a section related to the past decade of law enforcement agencies using a variety of technologies to deanonymize Tor. Recently 2019 and forward there has been some new form a attack that does not use a NIT, and has some greater than 50% reliablity. The law enforcement agencies only appear to be able to deanonymize a few IP addresses per day, so whatever the method, it's computationally intensive. I digress.....the point is, I added a section, but don't think it's necessarily in the correct place. It could be broken down by year in the Reception, impact, and legislation section, which doesn't seem to be the right title for the by-year section. We mention a government attack early on in the Firefox/Tor browser attack section, OR we have an entire section of attacks in weaknesses. It seems like we have different attacks and vulnerabilities scattered all over the place. Is this best? I'm opening the floor for a lengthy debate, since the organization seems a tad haphazard if the goal was to read the article and understand the history of vulnerabilities and attacks etc. eximo ( talk) 00:32, 2 March 2024 (UTC)
![]() | The contents of the TorSearch page were merged into Tor (network) on 8 February 2023. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
![]() | TorSearch was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 19 October 2022 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Tor (network). The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here. |
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Tor (network) article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
Archives:
1,
2,
3Auto-archiving period: 60 days
![]() |
![]() | This ![]() It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
![]() | The subject of this article is controversial and content may be in dispute. When updating the article, be bold, but not reckless. Feel free to try to improve the article, but don't take it personally if your changes are reversed; instead, come here to the talk page to discuss them. Content must be written from a neutral point of view. Include citations when adding content and consider tagging or removing unsourced information. |
![]() | The contents of the Portable Tor page were merged into Tor (network) on 9 November 2013. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected page, please see its history; for the discussion at that location, see its talk page. |
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available
on the course page. Student editor(s):
Atticusbixby.
Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT ( talk) 11:31, 17 January 2022 (UTC)
"An extract of a Top Secret appraisal by the National Security Agency (NSA) characterized Tor as "the King of high secure, low latency Internet anonymity" with "no contenders for the throne in waiting"."
"As of 2012, 80% of The Tor Project's $2M annual budget came from the United States government,"
hahaha. oh dear. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.233.16.6 ( talk) 08:12, 7 October 2014
Hello,
I'm definitely late with my response, but I'm adding this comment for posterity, as this isn't the first time I've read something like this.
Sponsors are publicly listed: https://www.torproject.org/about/sponsors/
Here is an excerpt from the text of this page:
The variety of people who use Tor is actually part of what makes it so secure. Tor hides you among the other users on the network, so the more populous and diverse the user base for Tor is, the more your anonymity will be protected.
If you develop something especially for "covert" operations, it will be quickly fingerprinted and attributed to that group. What they need is repudiation, so it makes sense that the more users have access to that tool, the easier it is to blend in. The same argument can be made for Ghidra (originally developed by the NSA) or even SELinux. I do remember reading about this somewhere, but can't figure out where at the moment.
Anything can devolve into conspiracy territory, but at some point in the (digital) world someone has to be trusted, there is no other way around it. Personally, while nothing is perfect, I trust the Tor Project and what they are doing.
Kind regards,
IrrationalBeing ( talk) 20:03, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: Moved ( non-admin closure) ( t · c) buidhe 15:50, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
Tor (anonymity network) → Tor (network) – simpler disambiguation term Deku-shrub ( talk) 22:01, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
First the trivial: As of this day, link [41] (Cox, Joseph (1 February 2016). "Study Claims Dark Web Sites Are Most Commonly Used for Crimes". Retrieved 20 March 2016.) referring to the graph to Tor usage is broken, and thus the traffic statistics presented are called into question.
So far as I can tell, there are now numerous claims being made about the utility and cost of ToR. One of the best papers I've seen that isn't cited yet is a 2020 work by Jardine et al: The potential harms of the Tor anonymity network cluster disproportionately in free countries; Eric Jardine, Andrew M. Lindner, Gareth Owenson; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 2020, 117 (50) 31716-31721; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2011893117
On the other hand, there is a well known quote from a blog from the CEO of Cloudflare indicating that some 94% of requests they were seeing in 2016 was malware. See https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/. That quote is a bit long in the tooth as well.
These claims are not completely out of alignment with one another, because of the methodologies used. The Jardine work in particular compares in network versus out of network access, while of course Cloudflare is looking only at its clear site access.
My suggestion is that the controversy over benefits versus drawbacks be called out in a bit more articulate fashion, a'la "here are purported benefits... here are purported risks..." That would also more clearly demonstrate balance to the reader. Pigdog234 ( talk) 09:54, 31 May 2021 (UTC)
This needs to be investigated. Wikipedia is seriously abusing this API, and I suppose even logs ips, considering somehow only less protected ips are blocked by real people, and others are just blocked by Tor Block extension of wikimedia engine on github. I will propose to stop Onionoo to Tor Project. Valery Zapolodov ( talk) 18:05, 6 June 2021 (UTC)
Saw this reverted edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Tor_(network)&diff=1092140671&oldid=1092139313
About this--back in the day, pre-2015 I believe, Tor was written as TOR and did stand for "The Onion Router". Today, it is spelled "Tor", but the acronym is still valid. M4sugared ( talk) 22:30, 10 June 2022 (UTC)
So I haven't bothered discussing this since the above discussion because it's mostly been a relatively harmless issue, but because of recent edits, I'm going to reiterate that Tor is not an acronym, and never was. The etymology of it is "The Onion Router", yes, but it never actually stood for that per se (hence "Tor" and not "TOR"). The fact it is commonly referred to as such is an error, but one common enough that I could see why people would think otherwise, and why it wasn't a huge deal to be in the lead. But unlike Tor the idea or Tor the network, it is absolutely unambiguous that the software itself was never called "The Onion Router". You will not find that name in its README, or its source code, because from the original publication of the Tor paper, they never called that code base anything other than Tor (well, more accurately, they call it "tor", or "little-t-tor", to distinguish it from all those other things, but I'm not going to bother disputing that spelling). I've changed the existing cites on the issue to a book published by MIT press with a quote discussing this misconception. Hopefully that's enough to settle the issue? If need be, I can pull more sources for this, but I do want to emphasize that typically reputable sources outside the space get this wrong all the time, and I kind of suspect that misconception itself originates from rushed journalists reading this very article, which is why a sourced book from an academic publisher is better than the tertiary news sites we would typically be okay to rely on. - Tga ( talk) 04:58, 18 May 2024 (UTC)
I added a section related to the past decade of law enforcement agencies using a variety of technologies to deanonymize Tor. Recently 2019 and forward there has been some new form a attack that does not use a NIT, and has some greater than 50% reliablity. The law enforcement agencies only appear to be able to deanonymize a few IP addresses per day, so whatever the method, it's computationally intensive. I digress.....the point is, I added a section, but don't think it's necessarily in the correct place. It could be broken down by year in the Reception, impact, and legislation section, which doesn't seem to be the right title for the by-year section. We mention a government attack early on in the Firefox/Tor browser attack section, OR we have an entire section of attacks in weaknesses. It seems like we have different attacks and vulnerabilities scattered all over the place. Is this best? I'm opening the floor for a lengthy debate, since the organization seems a tad haphazard if the goal was to read the article and understand the history of vulnerabilities and attacks etc. eximo ( talk) 00:32, 2 March 2024 (UTC)