[tor-talk] Tor is anti-censorship software

[grarpamp]

On 6/29/16, Mansour Moufid <mansourmoufid at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 11:56 AM, Paul Syverson
> <paul.syverson at nrl.navy.mil> wrote:
>
> The audience of the Tor project, ever since it's provided a convenient
> browser rather than just source code, is the average user, not the
> technical community.  So when the Tor project website promises
> "anonymity," they are not using the technical definition.
>
>> technical analysis teases intuitions out. If you have a better single
>> word than 'anonymity' that conveys to people who don't want to read
>> all that technical mumbo-jumbo what Tor provides, I think we would
>> all be happy to use it. (Well I would anyway.)
>
> If it were just about which words to use, the term "unlinkability"
> has been proposed before.  But words aren't the problem.
>
> Here's another term in the advertising material that has a specific
> technical definition: traffic analysis.  Tor is advertised as a
> protecting against traffic analysis (by governments a.k.a. global
> adversaries) which it does not and couldn't possibly do.
>
> The advertising doesn't correspond to reality, because it's false
> and dishonest, not because the user is dumb.

Years ago there was a thread about some of the words and phrases
used on the website were not the best. Especially given knowledge
of what tor was both good and not so good at on a technical level
(such as good against the ISP office snoop, and poor against GPA).
A few on the list made suggestions on updated verbage to put on front
page, download page, etc. It's also hard finding conciseness that works
with "dumb". There weren't any blockers, it just fell by everyone's wayside.

I've always wanted to see, for instance on the download page,
with links to the wiki for more details...
"G. Tor does not present a solution to GPA threat model."
"S. Use your apps within a Sandbox (VM's, Whonix, Qubes,
Unix Jails, packet filters) that is then only allowed to talk to Tor).

https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en
Something more about users actually using it to engage in
free / political / apolitical speech, controversial topics.
And of course everyday activities like markets, darknet social,
comms, general hacker hobbying in onionland, so on.

The current descriptions and use cases go back quite a way...
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011223019/http://www.torproject.org/
https://web.archive.org/web/20071009030315/http://wiki.noreply.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter

Now in 2016 we know a lot more about, and have more
real experience with, various threat models and Tor.

Perhaps now is a good time for interested people to put
some work into this as a real subproject and actually
start committing some updates.