tor

Wed Jun 24 22:35:56 UTC 2009

Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 24, 2009 at 12:43:15PM -0700, Randy Bush wrote:
>> sadly, naively turning up tor to help folk who wish to be anonymous in
>> hard times gets one a lot of assertive email from self-important people
>> who wear formal clothes.
>>
>> folk who learn this the hard way may find a pointer passed to me by smb
>> helpful, <http://www.chrisbrunner.com/?p=119>.
> 
> If bittorrent of copyrighted material is the most illegal thing you
> helped facilitate while running tor, and all you got was an assertive
> e-mail because of it, you should consider yourself extremely lucky. 
> 
> Anonymity against privacy invasion and for political causes sure sounds
> like a great concept, but in reality it presents too tempting a target
> for abuse. If you choose to open up your internet connection to anyone
> who wants to use it, you should be prepared to be held accountable for
> what those anonymous people do with it. I'm sure you don't just sell 
> transit to any spammer who comes along without researching them a little 
> first, why should this be any different?

Sadly the ability to distinguish between the myriad forms of activity
defined in various localities as "crimnal enterprise" and pick out the
one's you're willing to support (sedition) vs those you aren't (use you
imagination) is not a property of the tool. knocking down bit-torrent
within tor seems straight forward enough but by in large to use the tool
you're going to have to take the bad with the good.