[tor-talk] 2 hop mode for people that only want to use Tor for censorship circumvention to conserve bandwidth and decrease latency?

[Greg Norcie]

Thanks Nathan.

While it's true VPNs have downsides, if bandwidth (and not anonymity) is
the top priority, Tor may not be the solution for that person. Even if we
drastically increase the number of nodes in the network, it's hard to
imagine Tor (with 3 hops) will be able to have less latency than a single
hop VPN.

(But yes, I agree we are too often quick to push people to VPNs)




/********************************************/
Greg Norcie (norcie at cdt.org)
Staff Technologist
Center for Democracy & Technology
District of Columbia office
(p) 202-637-9800
PGP: http://norcie.com/pgp.txt

/*******************************************/

On Mon, Jun 13, 2016 at 10:16 AM, Nathan Freitas <nathan at freitas.net> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 13, 2016, at 08:55 AM, Greg Norcie wrote:
> > If your main concern is merely circumvention (and you're not worried
> > about
> > retaliation for circumventing), you might be better off using a VPN.
> >
> > Unlike Tor, there is no globally published list of all VPN services, so
> > you
> > could probably find one that isn't blocked by your country. Most services
> > take Bitcoin if payment is an issue... I'd look askance at any "free"
> > VPN.
>
> I know you weren't saying this, Greg, but I do often feel that we are
> too quick to push people who only want circumvention, and not anonymity,
> away from using Tor. Also, increasingly with DPI / traffic
> fingerprinting, we are seeing VPN protocols being blocked in places like
> China, and thus the VPNs are adopting traffic obfuscation methods like
> Meek and ObfsProxy as part of their software.
>
> From Ars, a great thorough assessment of all the downsides to a VPN:
>
> "The impossible task of creating a “Best VPNs” list today: Our writer
> set out to make a list of reliable VPNs; turns out the task is
> complicated."
>
>
> http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/aiming-for-anonymity-ars-assesses-the-state-of-vpns-in-2016/
>
> Best,
>   Nathan
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