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Re: [LUG] Routing around damage

 

On Mon, Mar 24, 2014 at 08:48:37PM +0000, Philip Hudson wrote:
> I see what you're saying now. Is TOR sufficient to prevent this?

The short answer to that is: yes.

The long answer is that it's a little complicated.

Accessing content through Tor means that 1) no one controlling the
Internet connection (your ISP, an upstream ISP, a government) can see
what service you're accessing (this is stronger than SSL-encrypted
connections, where the IP address you're connecting to is still visible)
and 2) to the provider of the content, you're indistinguishable from any
other Tor-user.

(Although there might be other ways in which they can identify you, e.g.
if you login to Gmail to read your email, Google knows it's you. It has
to know.)

If you're accessing content that's generally available, but happens to
be blocked where you are (such as Twitter in Turkey) that's fine. But
accessing services like torrents can get those running exit nodes into
trouble in most places. Which is why people running exit nodes tend to
block these services.

(I should add that don't know how well this blocking works to prevent
those services from being accessed through Tor. I don't use Tor for
sharing files, or downloading shared files.)

You could download the data from a service hosted on 'Tor hidden
services', which are servers whose locations are also hidden. But this
is probably not going to work if you want to download huge files: the
connections are going to be very slow and no one might want to pay for
the bandwidth needed if thousands of people are going to download these
huge files. (The whole idea of p2p is that you don't need a central
server.)

Martijn.


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