Reduce hops when privacy level allows to save Tor network bandwidth

[Jim]

Tim Wilde wrote:
> On 11/18/2009 4:17 AM, Jim wrote:
>> Google was actually the motivating factor in causing me to get serious
>> about overcoming whatever problem I had when I first tried to use Tor.
>> Although my concern at the time was more the ubiquity of
>> google-analytics.  But still concerned about using their search engine.
>>  My problem was that (for quite a while now), when I try to do a search
>> on Google via Tor, more often than not Google calls me a virus and tells
>> me to go away ("unusual network activity" or some such).  My solution
>> has been to connect to Scroogle via Tor.  I am not nearly as anti-Google
>> as the guy (people?) who run Scroogle and I don't mind the unobtrusive
>> right column adds on Google search results.  Its just my (usual)
>> inability to use Google directly w/o dropping anonymity.
> 
> There's another relatively easy solution to the Analytics part - surf
> with a plugin like Firefox's NoScript installed, and forbid
> google-analytics.com from ever running scripts.  Boom, no more
> analytics, I believe NoScript won't even allow Firefox to fetch the code
> from the URL, so they don't even get the hit (note: I haven't actually
> confirmed that part explicitly).  Plus you get a ton of other safety
> benefits from browsing the web with scripting off by default, and the
> various other nasty things like clickjacking and XSS that NoScript
> attempts to block.

Yes.  I've long recognized that one of the possible ironies in my story 
is that google-analytics motivated me to get off my duff and get Tor 
working.  However, in the process of setting up Tor I found out that 
Privoxy could very nicely take care of google-analytics on its own.  But 
as I've alluded to, while google-analytics was the top motivator for me, 
there is other motivation from Google (as search engine) and others 
wishing to track me.

Others more knowledgeable than I may wish to comment on this, but I 
believe I have read that it is not a good idea to combine NoScript with 
Tor.  I can't give you the gory details.  While I don't know the details 
of how NoScript handles google-analytics, I do know (on the last version 
I checked) that by default Privoxy won't allow anything from 
google-analytics to load, including their script(s).

Cheers,
Jim

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