Comments on: Tor – Onion routing and the modern dissident

By: j|turn

j|turn — Mon, 05 Dec 2005 00:13:47 +0000

An Onion a Day Keeps the Speech Free

I don’t want to be overly dystrophic, but these are dark days for free speech. Internet filtering is becoming increasingly common in the world, the regimes are getting better at it and the schemes harder to circumvent.

This is where Tor, an EFF su…

By: …My heart’s in Accra » TorPark. Pretty Darned Cool.

…My heart’s in Accra » TorPark. Pretty Darned Cool. — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 19:08:23 +0000

[...] I blogged a few months back about TOR – The Onion Router – an anonymizing technology that encrypts and reroutes packets between several computers to add a high degree of anonymity to web surfing. One of my complaints at the time was that TOR was a somewhat tricky install – much easier than most anonymizing technologies, but still non-trivial for a technical user. (The folks behind TOR realize this and are running a contest to create a highly usable graphical user interface for the tool.) And unlikely that most users accessing the Internet via cybercafes would be able to install TOR on the computers they were using. [...]

By: ST

ST — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 17:06:59 +0000

I have solved the problem of Tor requiring an install and not being able to run on university machine. With help, we have combined Tor with Firefox Deer Park Alpha 2, for a relatively secure combination which allows users to browse anonymously and leaving virtually no tracks behind. The whole thing fits on 19MB of storage space, and is designed to run on simple USB keychains. It requires no install or storage, and only the running of a batch file (for now.)

The upshot is that anyone can walk up to a public terminal, stick in a USB flash card, and surf the web anonymous, clean, and encrypted.

This will be released to the public very soon, and there will certainly be a Chinese edition.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Mon, 16 May 2005 22:35:22 +0000

ken – is that documented anywhere? I haven’t been able to find reports of Tor being blocked in China, though i have no doubt that it’s true…

By: Ken Thomas

Ken Thomas — Fri, 13 May 2005 22:52:24 +0000

Note that there are already multiple published blacklists of TOR servers. This has resulted in TOR access being (alas) commonly blocked from locations in China (well, in the Shenzhen area at least).

By: Justin Mason

Justin Mason — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 21:05:59 +0000

Regarding the speed issue — actually, I’d say most of the speed hit is coming from each packet traversing, let’s say, 4 additional TCP streams in addition to the baseline 1 for a direct connection.

If that’s the case, then the slow links in developing nations would not be so much of an issue; the slowness you see would be pretty similar to the slowness they’d see, in turn.

It’s less of an apparent slowdown.

To explain: let’s say user A in the US can contact site X, with a latency of 100ms, and user B in a developing nation can contact site X with a latency of 300ms. If a Tor connection adds 500ms, then the *difference* (the apparent slowdown) for A-Tor-X compared to A-X would be 600/100 = 6 times slower; but for B-Tor-X compared to B-X it’s 800/300 = 2.66 times slower. does that make sense? ;)

By: Chris Palmer

Chris Palmer — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 21:30:14 +0000

Thanks for the good and useful Tor writeup! We are indeed focusing a lot of thought on usability, and are working on getting a comprehensive GUI together.