amuck-landowner

Which vps hoster allows tor hidden services?

Reece-DM

New Member
Verified Provider
What are you talking about? Hope you aren't referring to the Firefox exploit

And the DoD funds roughly 40% of the money TOR receives.
That;s the thing that makes me laugh, it was designed for them but criminals are using it. so In theory with the current situation of the NSA I'm pretty sure it's not so "Anonymous"

Sure it can hide your identity to most people, but I wouldn't trust the network itself from your government's.
 

clarity

Active Member
If you know that people are using this for wrong doing, why would you want to run one? I understand that anonymity part of it, but a lot of people are using this to view more than questionable things. Why support that?
 

HalfEatenPie

The Irrational One
Retired Staff
If you know that people are using this for wrong doing, why would you want to run one? I understand that anonymity part of it, but a lot of people are using this to view more than questionable things. Why support that?
See for many people it's supporting the free speech and protection of whistleblowers.  They look at the positives and say "you have to take the bad with the good" and supports the TOR Project to allow whistleblowers to continue/do what they believe is right (they value helping whistleblowers high enough that it justifies having to deal with abuse (e.g. CP distributors)).  

For others they just see the negative (not pointing any fingers but similar to what you just wrote as an example) and place that higher on their priority list than helping out the whistleblowers and people who wish to stay anonymous.  

It's a complicated situation, and while we would all love to have an idealistic world where we only get the positives (help the whistleblowers) without the negatives (distribution of CP), we currently haven't found a way to deal with it and therefore kinda stuck with the tools at hand.  

This is actually how politics work, because many politicians don't want to be labeled "that one politician who supports CP" and therefore immediately supports for restrictions on such services, but unfortunately most of these policies also contain many legitimate casualties, and on the website some of these websites are people's livelihoods.  For another example, this is VERY similar to how SOPA was worded (very broadly/generally that too many legitimate websites would fall casualty to the act and many people on the internet considered the "trade-off" was too high).  
 
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wlanboy

Content Contributer
If you know that people are using this for wrong doing, why would you want to run one? I understand that anonymity part of it, but a lot of people are using this to view more than questionable things. Why support that?
Because like a lot of technical things it depends on how humans are using it.

Cars kill a lot of people - so let's ban all cars.
 

Shados

Professional Snake Miner
I've got two points to make in regards to the arguments for/against Tor:

  1. If you ban/restrict/criminalize Tor and equivalent systems, you leave no real legal means of anonymous internet usage, but you still leave plenty of illegal ones. In a world without Tor, or with Tor being illegal, criminals could and still would be able to get anonymous internet access, but people with legitimate, ethical need for it would not. People willing to distribute child pornography aren't going to be put off by the illegal and/or unethical nature of the other options, so you're only significantly restricting ethical people
  2. In regards to issues of anonymity, secure/encrypted communications, etc. I often hear the claim that "If you aren't a criminal, you should have nothing to hide". Aside from the obvious ridiculousness of the statement (we are all private creatures to one degree or another - there are always things you might not want to broadcast to the public), there's a pretty big problem with this: you generally have quite a lot of things you would rather criminals did not know - like your credit card or banking details. Anonymity can be used not just by whistleblowers under oppressive regimes, but by people who want to anonymously/safely report information about crimes they've witnessed, criminal organizations, etc.
 
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Aldryic C'boas

The Pony
  1. If you ban/restrict/criminalize Tor and equivalent systems, you leave no real legal means of anonymous internet usage, but you still leave plenty of illegal ones. In a world without Tor, or with Tor being illegal, criminals could and still would be able to get anonymous internet access, but people with legitimate, ethical need for it would not. People willing to distribute child pornography aren't going to be put off by the illegal and/or unethical nature of the other options, so you're only significantly restricting ethical people
Gotta disagree completely there.  Completely ignoring all of the Free/Open VPN services (or the paid ones that accept bitcoin and care not what you put for your name), you can easily pick up a pre-paid phone with a data plan without submitting ID.  Head over to XDA, grab an Android ROM to flash that'll let you turn said phone into a wifi router.  (Or just hit the net from various hotspots.. McDonalds, coffee shops, etc). 

There are PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously without breaking any laws.  TOR is not some saviour here to free us all from oppression - it's merely a single tool that can be used to reach a collection of websites unavailable without TOR or a gateway.  A tool that gets severely misused for very dirty purposes;  but defenders try to point out that people use it for good things, too.  Okay - so did anonymity and free speech not exist before TOR?  Hardly.  I personally dont support TOR because I see it as a black market of unethical pornography, drugs, and so forth - just with an optional feature of "anonymously" browsing.  Same reason I won't support organizations like the NAACP or KKK - sure, each organization does some honestly good things; but for the most part I want no involvement in the racism and divisionist ideals.
 

Shados

Professional Snake Miner
Gotta disagree completely there.  Completely ignoring all of the Free/Open VPN services (or the paid ones that accept bitcoin and care not what you put for your name), you can easily pick up a pre-paid phone with a data plan without submitting ID.  Head over to XDA, grab an Android ROM to flash that'll let you turn said phone into a wifi router.  (Or just hit the net from various hotspots.. McDonalds, coffee shops, etc). 

There are PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously without breaking any laws.  TOR is not some saviour here to free us all from oppression - it's merely a single tool that can be used to reach a collection of websites unavailable without TOR or a gateway.  A tool that gets severely misused for very dirty purposes;  but defenders try to point out that people use it for good things, too.  Okay - so did anonymity and free speech not exist before TOR?  Hardly.  I personally dont support TOR because I see it as a black market of unethical pornography, drugs, and so forth - just with an optional feature of "anonymously" browsing.  Same reason I won't support organizations like the NAACP or KKK - sure, each organization does some honestly good things; but for the most part I want no involvement in the racism and divisionist ideals.

Free/Open VPN services generally have known, individual organizations controlling them (making them susceptible to governments, coercion and probably corruption/bribery), limited/known points of failure & control (VPN providers generally have fairly small+stable set of servers they provide services out of), don't make you anonymous to the VPN provider/network (no onion routing through third party nodes or other solutions utilized), etc. They provide a very limited form of anonymity, and honestly, do you really doubt such services aren't already covered under PRISM or similar projects? What well-funded, half-competent intelligence agency would let them slip by?

Hotspots and pre-paid mobile internet without provided ID are a little better, but aren't available everywhere (and the latter is becoming available in fewer places every year, sadly) but still have large risk factors in that they essentially provide decently specific time+physical location data, and usually places that provide wifi or prepaid mobile internet SIM cards have cameras, the combination of which is more than enough to identify you. This is (probably?) not much of an issue if you're concerned about criminal organizations tracking you, but represents an actual risk for people living under repressive governments, whistleblowers, etc.

And yes, you are right, Tor does get misused a lot. But the solution to the problem of misuse of technology is not to to severely restrict our outlaw it - you're just dealing with the symptoms, not the cause. And, again, while such measures would mean law-abiding persons wouldn't use it, the reality is that you'd just be creating a new black market - in anonymity. You'd inevitably get criminals selling access to botnet-backed onion routing networks and the like if you cracked down on anonymous web access hard enough... and if you're just cracking down on Tor, and there are "PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously" then what's to stop criminals from just using those ways instead? What's the point of going after just one particular anonymity service?
 

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
There are PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously without breaking any laws.  TOR is not some saviour here to free us all from oppression - it's merely a single tool that can be used to reach a collection of websites unavailable without TOR or a gateway.  
That's actually a side benefit to TOR, not the main or original purpose.  The main purpose is to defeat traffic analysis.  I suspect I'm telling you something you already know but pointing it out for others.  Without TOR, it's possible for a government to say "I don't know what you're saying, but I know who you're talking to".  With TOR, that's a lot harder if not impossible.

TOR offers:

(a) a way to defeat traffic analysis

(b) a way for people to communicate in a nontraceable way (though this is not unique to TOR - I believe you can do the same thing with FreeNet)


© a way for people to access content they couldn't otherwise access due to censorship (e.g., Great Firewall of China).  I'm not sure a TOR is much better than a private VPN in that case.

 


I completely understand your arguments, but I think freedom is always a double-edged sword.  That's really what this debate comes down to and both sides are reasonable.

 

I don't know what the ratio of Silk Road/Child Porn/terrorist activity vs. dissidents/don't-want-to-be-spied-on/hey-this-geek-stuff-is-cool ratio among TOR users.  No one really does.  I suspect critics would say 90:10 (though they're guessing).  Supporters would say without TOR, life for that 10% would be harder, while the 90% would go accomplish the same things using something else.  It is demonstrable that TOR has done good in the world and evil...like most technology.

But hey, the government pays 80% of the TOR Project's funding, so it must be a good thing, right?   :D
 

Aldryic C'boas

The Pony
Free/Open VPN services generally have known, individual organizations controlling them (making them susceptible to governments, coercion and probably corruption/bribery), limited/known points of failure & control (VPN providers generally have fairly small+stable set of servers they provide services out of), don't make you anonymous to the VPN provider/network (no onion routing through third party nodes or other solutions utilized), etc. They provide a very limited form of anonymity, and honestly, do you really doubt such services aren't already covered under PRISM or similar projects? What well-funded, half-competent intelligence agency would let them slip by?
As opposed to a project designed and deployed BY an alphabet agency, right? :p In all seriousness though - that's differentiating protecting who you are from protecting what you're doing. You can quite easily obtain a VPN to achieve both goals.

Hotspots and pre-paid mobile internet without provided ID are a little better, but aren't available everywhere (and the latter is becoming available in fewer places every year, sadly) but still have large risk factors in that they essentially provide decently specific time+physical location data, and usually places that provide wifi or prepaid mobile internet SIM cards have cameras, the combination of which is more than enough to identify you. This is (probably?) not much of an issue if you're concerned about criminal organizations tracking you, but represents an actual risk for people living under repressive governments, whistleblowers, etc.
Quite right, public wifi can be risky. If you get traced back to it - keep in mind, my examples are partial concepts. Simply going to a public wifi hotspot does not grant you any safety; it's merely one step of several.

And yes, you are right, Tor does get misused a lot. But the solution to the problem of misuse of technology is not to to severely restrict our outlaw it - you're just dealing with the symptoms, not the cause. And, again, while such measures would mean law-abiding persons wouldn't use it, the reality is that you'd just be creating a new black market - in anonymity. You'd inevitably get criminals selling access to botnet-backed onion routing networks and the like if you cracked down on anonymous web access hard enough... and if you're just cracking down on Tor, and there are "PLENTY of ways to use the web anonymously" then what's to stop criminals from just using those ways instead? What's the point of going after just one particular anonymity service?
I never said to go after TOR. Merely that I don't support it and have my reasons not to use it. Similar example: I happen to find marijuana rather disgusting; from the smell down to how some people act when high. But I've got some good friends (some here at VPSB too) that'll light up from time to time, and I'm not going to interfere with their lifestyle just because they partake in a recreational I don't personally care for.

Aside from usage issues, there's also a rather large problem people tend to blind themselves to - when's the last time any of you actually went through TOR's source? Or the source of any VPN/Proxy service? Can you honestly say you know 100% exactly what takes place when you use these services? For my VPN and Proxy daemons of choice, I can easily say 'yes' to this. I can't do so with TOR - and given its dubious origins (from a source I already have zero trust in), there's no way in hell I'd risk using it on the basis of "those guys on the internet say its secure".

That's actually a side benefit to TOR, not the main or original purpose.  The main purpose is to defeat traffic analysis.  I suspect I'm telling you something you already know but pointing it out for others.  Without TOR, it's possible for a government to say "I don't know what you're saying, but I know who you're talking to".  With TOR, that's a lot harder if not impossible.

TOR offers:

(a) a way to defeat traffic analysis

( B) a way for people to communicate in a nontraceable way (though this is not unique to TOR - I believe you can do the same thing with FreeNet)

© a way for people to access content they couldn't otherwise access due to censorship (e.g., Great Firewall of China).  I'm not sure a TOR is much better than a private VPN in that case.
Quite true. TOR offers a few options that are positive, even if they aren't unique.

And Tor is currently hosting a quite big botnet.

Can't believe that they just start to realize that Tor hidden services are quite good to host the control servers of a botnet.
I can't believe it took them this long to realize a good chunk of the C&Cs have been running as .onions for quite some time now. This isn't really 'new' to anyone but said researchers mentioned in the article.
 

wlanboy

Content Contributer
I can't believe it took them this long to realize a good chunk of the C&Cs have been running as .onions for quite some time now. This isn't really 'new' to anyone but said researchers mentioned in the article.
I think this news is pushed because a lot of people said "this is because of the NSA and Syria stuff".

And of course because of the scale.

Double the number of TOR users in between August the 19th and August the 26th.

And double this number between August the 26th and September the 2nd again.

tormetrics.jpg
 

kaniini

Beware the bunny-rabbit!
Verified Provider
We had a bad interaction with SOCA due to a hidden service recently.  We are still debating whether or not to disallow TOR altogether as a result.
 

Echelon

New Member
Verified Provider
There are definitely legitimate uses for TOR, and there are definitely illegitimate uses just the same. What really determines whether more providers are going to make the choice to drop TOR from being permitted is the amount of time, energy, and money they have to invest in defending the use of TOR as an exit node on their network. Also, to mention the amount of bulk traffic TOR generates in the meanwhile, some providers would prefer the users of the servers know a bit more about what's coming in or going out of their server.

At the end of the day, I wouldn't be surprised if we see providers shift in their stance depending on where servers are housed and the legal climate of their footprint.
 

rm_

New Member
What really determines whether more providers are going to make the choice to drop TOR from being permitted is the amount of time, energy, and money they have to invest in defending the use of TOR as an exit node on their network.
No one reasonable expects your random VPS provider to allow exit nodes. And this particular thread is about hidden services, not exit nodes.

By the way (to everyone), it's specifically "Tor", not TOR or ToR or T.O.R, I think that was even in their FAQ somewhere.
 
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