On Thu, Jan 14, 2016 at 05:58:50PM +0100, Markus Hitter wrote: > > On 32C3 a few weeks ago ... > > https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7322-tor_onion_services_more_useful_than_you_think > > ... Roger cheered a lot about Facebook offering a hidden service. > > To be honest, this surprises me quite a bit. Tor is for anonymisation, > so one can escape tax paid surveillance by NSA, GCHQ & Co., which is > useful. And then such a Tor user connects to Facebook, where one has to > log in, making this anonymisation completely pointless? At least I don't > get the point.
Tor is about separating identification from routing, as we explicitly stated in publication way back in 1996. And it is not just for access to a site from which one wants to remain anonymous or pseudonymous. One of the motivating examples we gave when starting this work c. 1995-6 was someone traveling wanting to log into a workstation at their usual work location not wanting network observers to know their association with where they work. Another example would be to login but not identify to their destination where they are logging in from. In both of these cases, you want to be not just identified but authenticated by the destination. This was part of the motivation for Tor from the beginning of onion routing. But whatever our motivation was, it is a tool. We should not be dictating based on our original motivations creative ways that other people find to make use of that tool as long as that use isn't abusive or destructive. As Robert Hunter brilliantly observed wrt commentary on lyrics he wrote: I know where it's come from, but I don't know where it's been. aloha, Paul -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
