False. Perfect anonymity is not very difficult; all you need is a clean computer, some standard tools that you can easily download, and a little time with no one looking over your shoulder.
Modify that to “good enough” and I would agree. If someone was really determined to track you down anonymity is hard.
In any case some of us would have to resort to sock puppets because we’ve already disclosed the connection between our user names and our IRL names.
Modify that to “good enough” and I would agree. If someone was really determined to track you down anonymity is hard.
No, I said perfect anonymity, and that’s what I meant. The Tor anonymity network really does work as advertised, provided you use a fresh account and don’t try to keep long-running pseudonyms.
Would TOR be suitable for, say, preventing the FBI from discovering that one was a consumer of child pornography, even if they were already suspicious of you and were actively trying to monitor your communications? “Protection from determined law enforcement” is pretty much the gold standard of computer privacy...
Only if you know exactly what you’re doing, and never use an FBI-monitored exit node or visit an FBI-controlled honeypot site. Tor’s threat model does not provide protection against an adversary that can monitor both the encrypted traffic coming from you, and the unencrypted traffic coming from an exit node or honeypot hidden service.
I don’t understand why jimrandomh is claiming that Tor is “perfect”. It certainly can be effective, but like most crypto, using it safely requires an adequate familiarity with its brittle points.
Modify that to “good enough” and I would agree. If someone was really determined to track you down anonymity is hard.
In any case some of us would have to resort to sock puppets because we’ve already disclosed the connection between our user names and our IRL names.
No, I said perfect anonymity, and that’s what I meant. The Tor anonymity network really does work as advertised, provided you use a fresh account and don’t try to keep long-running pseudonyms.
Would TOR be suitable for, say, preventing the FBI from discovering that one was a consumer of child pornography, even if they were already suspicious of you and were actively trying to monitor your communications? “Protection from determined law enforcement” is pretty much the gold standard of computer privacy...
I thought Tor had weaknesses?
Only if you know exactly what you’re doing, and never use an FBI-monitored exit node or visit an FBI-controlled honeypot site. Tor’s threat model does not provide protection against an adversary that can monitor both the encrypted traffic coming from you, and the unencrypted traffic coming from an exit node or honeypot hidden service.
I don’t understand why jimrandomh is claiming that Tor is “perfect”. It certainly can be effective, but like most crypto, using it safely requires an adequate familiarity with its brittle points.