[tor-talk] Possibly Smart, Possibly Stupid, Idea Regarding Tor & Linux Distributions

[grarpamp]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017 at 8:29 AM, Sebastian Hahn <sebastian at torproject.org> wrote:
>> On 04 Jan 2017, at 12:24, Alec Muffett <alec.muffett at gmail.com> wrote:

>> Large chunks of the Tor community are focused on Tor's primary purpose as
>> an anonymising proxy, and that's very, very important.
>>
>> It is Tor's primary and best-understood, to provide people with a secure
>> and generally anonymized means to connect to cleartext websites.
>>
>> But (subjective opinion) I think the future of Tor is in disintermediated
>> networking.  I think the future is in onions.
>
> I think onions will either be the future or the downfall of Tor. We will see
> which one of these it'll be :)

Remember, tor's onion services were an early yet subsequent happenstance
that piggybacked on tor's already developed primary clearnet access case,
architecture and deployment. We all recognize the need for two things
1) clearnet access strategies, perhaps as largely represented by tor today
2) private / hidden / p2p services ecosystems

Under that realization, and developing / choosing best to suit needs,
it really doesn't matter if one application (tor) does them both or not.
So the use of 'future' or 'downfall' is not really a fairly applicable or
expectable terminology there. Forking / pathfinding of ideas / code
for best fitment is not shameful, it's necessary.

For all we know I2P or some other overlay will rise to serve (2).
Perhaps IETF will RFC for all physical links and chips being
point-to-point encrypted per link with full time background fill traffic.
Perhaps... lots of things to come we cannot predict yet.