[tor-talk] General questions about Tor proxy

[Akater]

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Thanks for yuour response, I'm very glad that the topic is not ignored.

> The discussion "Tor needs a forum" is old.

I would never advocate for a forum! Forums are dreadful for a multitude
of objective reasons. My messages are wordy enough, so I'll skip 7
paragraphs on why forums are bad. :-)

> phpbb

I'm (100-\epsilon)% sure /that/ would be a total waste of time &
effort, for example.

> q/a style forum on stackexchange:
> https://tor.stackexchange.com/
> [...]
> Bad choice, since hosted on a third party page. Bad for privacy reasons.

That's precisely the kind of reasoning I attack. What exactly is the
concern? That they would tamper with answers? That they can close
someday? That it's easy to get your identity exposed there? They won't
do the first because that involves huge risks, and they are less likely
to close due to them being commercially successful. Tor, as the
company, is more likely to close. (And mirroring is always a good
practice.) Last but not least, there's nothing wrong with letting
everyone know that you're an active Tor user. Actually, this should be
encuraged: if only it became a common practice, both blockings and cop
assaults on the grounds of so-called “suspicious traffic activity”
would reduce, if not disappear entirely. We just got a bit unlucky that
it wasn't the way Internet worked from the very beginning.

Tor is all about third parties interacting without assumptions of
initial trust to each other! Why doesn't this great idea echo in
participants, I'm clueless of.

StackExchange doesn't make you register. Sometimes I see people even
posting Q's anonymously. Now, there may be an additional stigma on it
due to the fact that Sir Silk Road got caught at StackOverflow. But he,
unfortunately, made a security mistake himself (nothing protects people
from one of these, except for themselves). Yes, this company, being a
big and legal one, collaborates with badged&armed people. Lots of
people do. Lots of Tor users might do that as well in certain
circumstances, but we're still supposed to collaborate with each other
in a network. Because that's the point: security is about trust, and IT
security is largely about collaborating without much of an estabilished
scheme of trust. We can implement it on the TCP/IP level, why won't we
do that at other levels as well?

> Also constant risk of getting that page deleted.
> […] not fulfilling the in my opinion irrational "beta requirements"

That risk is the part of what makes SE so damn good. They are as
successful at building quality content available to anyone as it gets
for the last 20 (?) years, so I just don't want to judge their beta
requirements. MathOverflow is extremely active, while Theoretical
Physics died at beta stage. Nobody can explain why: mathematicians,
esp. those in domains dominating at MO, are usually percieved as more
socially awkward than any other scientists, and yet there is a
difference. Nobody really knows how communities get estabilished but SE
has something besides statistics: they got results, and they reproduce
them over and over again, with topics you'd never thought they could.
https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/ I'd let them do whatever they
think is neccessary.

I didn't expect myself to turn this message into SE advocacy. But the
more I think of it, the better option it looks. It is de facto the best
way of gathering factual content, *and* build a community, if not a
general one, but definitely an “expert community” — which is also
helpful for amateurs. I'll probably ask more questions there.

In conclusion, I claim that investment in SE is, while somewhat risky,
is also potentially a good choice. The expected value is very high.

> askbot hosted on torproject.org wouldn't be worse than stackexchange

Thanks for the info, I'll take a look. I don't claim knowing the best
way to do it, I just think SE managers know one. :-)
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