[tor-talk] Brave Review Mentions Tor

[Drew at FoundingDocuments.org]

> On Nov 16, 2019, at 5:31am, grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/15/19, Drew at FoundingDocuments.org <Drew at foundingdocuments.org> wrote:
>> 1) VPN
>> 
>> 2) Tor
> 
> Keep in mind that both entites are essentially in the
> business of selling their own sort of reasonably
> good yet well caveated products, they both receive
> sizable compensation streams in return.
> 
> When evaluating the claims of each,
> it is best to consider not only them,
> but also independant analysis as well.
> 
> And integrate into your own use case and
> threat models whichever of one, both, or
> none of them, that may serve you best.

I’ve been gorging on Tor info for a few months now; at first to see if some claims I heard about it were true, since it had been many years since I tried Vidalia, or sought out info on the Tor Project. 

But serendipity and the confluence of misc. events made me think Tor was worth taking another look at. One of my relatives works for the NSA.  I’ve taken a stances on some controversial subjects. But those didn’t factor in much. Mainly I was excited I could securely access my own computers/data while out and about, I could share family photos, movies I made with my brother’s kids, and help my elderly parents share theirs with their grandchildren, and them with us without having to post them publicly, and another massive factor was that our govt. had begun promoting outrageous conflict of interest by allowing telcos/ISPs to get into the advertising business, thus increasing their horribly offensive spying and stalking  everyone and treating us all like fish in a barrel. 

This does not mean I’m not sympathetic to the many other use cases for Tor which it can bring benefit to societies. 

My level of understanding Tor hasn’t yet increased enough to know the intricacies of connecting to a VPN first. Connecting to an average VPN I guess is ok, but like I said, probably means a slowdown, and expense.  

I do understand the obviousness of: if your ISP is blocking Tor, then connecting to a VPN first could probably let you run Tor over it. But what if you think you are connecting to a VPN that’s on the up & up, but they are not? Can the VPN trick your Tor into choosing a bad guard or otherwise mess things up? I don’t know, and also, while I feel those questions are interesting, they are not really my focus at the moment. 




> Just like old BBS and telnet jump hosts and
> all sorts of proxies including http, VPN's
> and even other services and overlay networks
> can provide good levels of protection for the
> cases in which they apply.
> 
> Tor is not universally applicable or safe, neither
> are any of them. Tools just don't work that way.
> 
>> expense
> 
> Any opensource software and its services that appear "free",
> their users should consider ways to give something back,
> particularly to those they use every week but that
> receive little to nothing, in part due to the higher friction
> barriers smaller and unincorporated projects have.

Back in the 1990’s I bought an awesome Macintosh BBS program called TeleFinder for a few hundred dollars and tried to get teachers on it and discussing education. That was a massive outlay for an elementary school teacher in the deep south. Like Dr. John sings, it was the right time, but wrong place. I’d also overestimated teachers idealism and enthusiasm for their work. But thus is the usual plight of neophytes.