http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/02/80-percent-deep-web-traffic-child-abuse/#continued It kind of concerns me that being privacy conscious indicates that you have something to hide.
There is much to this article and video. It is important to acknowledge/understand that this refers to TOR's hidden services and NOT privacy through the general TOR network. The linked video is over an hour long and I haven't seen it all yet. While I may dispute the percentages it is clear that at least many of the hidden services are "bad actors" in the moral sense of the word. This is why I use a VPN before connecting to TOR. I feel a VPN is less "dirty looking" to my ISP because of these hidden service jerks, and I don't want that false suspicion being cast upon me. Conversely; there are many good hidden services and I have used them for privacy and coding "out of sight". Nothing wrong with that in my opinion. Its the association with the unscrupulous hidden sites that I want to avoid.
These results aren't about traffic to hidden services. That occurs via rendezvous relays, and those don't know identities of either users or hidden services. In fact, these results are based on lookup requests to hidden service directories, and there's no way to determine which of those lookups led to connections, and how much traffic (if any) resulted. I do wish that "journalists" more often had a clue https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-80-percent-percent-1-2-percent-abusive https://blog.torproject.org/blog/some-thoughts-hidden-services
I'm a bit surprised by this, but mostly because I think the idea of people having "something to hide" is basically a sham. Many crimes against children go unnoticed and unpunished, simply because the kids aren't first-world citizens. I won't go on a rant about this; but suffice to say that we have more surveillance and more people in slavery right now than at any prior point in human history. IMO that says all one needs to know.
Mirimir, We said the same thing but you are so much better at it than me. LOL!! Articles like this create such an unfair "stigma" about TOR, which again is why I cloak with a VPN first.
Just to clarify, I wasnt endorsing the technical content. Some great feedback on the article. More concerned with the change in public opinion associating TOR with child sexual abuse. It feels like it is a battle to keep the public engaged in maintaining privacy and that it is not wrong.
driekus, I totally get what you are saying. The public may react with "shut down TOR" it allows kiddie porn and worse. Don't you think the whole goal of this presentation is to sway public opinion about how dangerous privacy software is to our children? Surely, the author(s) know this is not an accurate depiction of TOR usage!
While I also care about such undisclosed criminal and invasion of human right, I don't agree to your first sentence if I understand it correctly. Probably everyone have something he/she don't want others to know it, unless you're a saint. Surely, that is the most expected reaction by general mass who don't know well about those technology, and we have seen sometimes such sensation comes true in other field. While I admit many contents of dark-web is related to illegal or unethical things, that's not all and dark-web is distinct thing from TOR itself as some member already mentioned. We don't need to blame the researcher but need to make counter-argument.
Even if it was true, it only proves, that those privacy services works. Instead of chasing people looking for webpages providing illegal content, they should just look for webpages, which provide it, since they are the ones, which abuse kids, not people hidden behind the computer screen. Tracking a webpage is definitely easier, as well as people behind by following the trail of money. But governments want to shut down privacy to zero, so they will keep spreading those misleading news.
Though investigating authority have already doing this, it's not that easy as those criminals usually take all measure, including bitcoin, but probably you know.
I know, but they always try to apprehend people like drug users instead of drug distributors. It is easy obviously, but it does not really solve the problem.
You didn't understand it correctly. What I meant is that a lot of crimes against children go unpunished. (And sorry, I don't really want to have this discussion...)
Typical government propaganda ploy. Associate anything that affects their ability to control with something dirty to turn public opinion against it. They did the same thing to the unions by looking for mob associations.
I think it was dangerous and rash to have presented directory lookups as "traffic" and "80%", given that the results were clearly anomalous, and traffic doesn't mean traffic in the normal network sense (which in any case, you'd expect to be higher for image/video material). Although Owen did provided caveats (routinely ignored by the media), I think he'd have been better saying that they did not understand the validity, reliability and significance of the 80% headline number, especially since the number of abuse HS was only 2%. There's something screwy there. Given that the HS are so ephemeral (normally a day or 2), it was also weird to propose as a way of limiting access, to blacklist those entries. You'd have to do so within a few hours to have much benefit. And then, "taking steps", "doing something about it" - anything, is most likely ineffective. Would it not be easier to get information from the perps who are caught and the criminal suppliers to understand the market and distribution methods - rather than an unreliable technical measure solely on Tor? And then take a rational view of how to attack the market & distribution (through vulnerable end-clients, server vulnerabilities, honey pots etc). Playing whack-a-mole with what is essentially one form of drop-box (temporary Tor HS) seems hopeless to me. People would find another route because there must be extensive out-of-band communications channels anyway. One of the things I like about JonDonym is that this is potentially open for warranted individual surveillance (as opposed to mass suspicion-less stuff), and I would like the deal to go back to that. The problem is that, given that the security services and legislators have not budged a jot on effectively warrantless bulk collection, they've more or less guaranteed this kind of problem.
