Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

[DaKahuna]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

The Greasemonkey script sounds like the way to go since Firefox is definately my browser of choice.

Whether to post here or PM is up to you.

[Asbestos]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

If you use Firefox, you could write a Greasemonkey script to automatically append '&hl=en' to all of your queries. I have one to append '&filter=0' because I hate having to go through all of those pages again. I could PM/post it here if you'd like.

[DaKahuna]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

Have you tried changing your Google search preferences to select a specific search language?

Yes, I have it set to English.

[Voltage Spike]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

I still get frustrated from time to time when all my Google searches come back to me in a foreign language.

Have you tried changing your Google search preferences to select a specific search language?

[TheCotMan]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

I still think Tor should take a BitTorrent approach.. Those who contribute bandwidth should get higher bandwidth speeds.

With no centralized control, wouldn't you think this would be easy to abuse, since peers would tell each other if they actually provide bandwidth, how much, and wouldn't this require trusting the client?

Everyone's "hacked" services could claim they are each sharing multiple OC768 links.

It is difficult to get QoS enforcement without an authoritative centralized control.

If you are are trusting something other than yourself, and you are not trusting a central service authority, then you are probably trusting your peers. Adding Centralized control and trust would likely increase risk for sessions to be tracked.

This is not really my own idea, since P2P clients have tried to enforce QoS to favor people sharing, for years, and with each attempt (where there is trust of the client) new "hacked" P2P clients are made to make false calims, that are believed. [There is an exception: one where each peer is trading parts it has for parts it doesn't and each p2p connection can actually examine the symmetry of throughput Ul:Dl to favor those sharing with each other.]

This happened before P2P with irc and identd, and various irc clients too, and even before IRC, and also happens in online games, where the applications actually runs on people's home computers.

Find a "secure" way to do this without trusting the client (peers) and not building a central authority, and you might make tons of money.

[hevnsnt]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

I still think Tor should take a BitTorrent approach.. Those who contribute bandwidth should get higher bandwidth speeds.

[DaKahuna]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

The nice thing about Vidalia is that you can reset the nodes with a click of a button.

I still get frustrated from time to time when all my Google searches come back to me in a foreign language.

[theprez98]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

I use it constantly. On my MacBoork Pro I have Vadalia set up and love it. Using Firefox's switch proxy capbility gives me the choice of running "under cover" or naked as I please. Safari is configured to always use Vadalia.

I have also noticed that the performance improvement and must say I am very happy with it.

I have the Firefox plugin enabled too. It's a nice addition. My Internet is not all that fast anyways, but Tor slows it down considerably, as least for me.

[dYn4mic]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

It really depends on what 3 nodes your circuit is going through. If your trying to get to a server hosted in london and your ending node is japan, it'll be slow. But if its oxford, then it should be quite a bit faster...

If its ALWAYS faster on average then something was wrong previously. The Tor network has not increased much in server's/bandwidth and it is still not even reaching full capacity. It could be that more people are blocking the common filesharing and bittorrent ports that were raping the Tor network.

To anyone that doesn't know, onion routing is much faster than most anonymity networks due to many factors including transfering streams not packets, using the same circuit for many connections, and TLS w/ rotating DH key exchange. Its ALWAYS going to be slower than a single proxy, but for the amount of anonymity it provides, its much more 'secure'.
Again with the tradeoffs :-P

[DaKahuna]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

I use it constantly. On my MacBoork Pro I have Vadalia set up and love it. Using Firefox's switch proxy capbility gives me the choice of running "under cover" or naked as I please. Safari is configured to always use Vadalia.

I have also noticed that the performance improvement and must say I am very happy with it.

[Asbestos]

Re: Onion Routing Networks performing a lot better... at least for me

I've been using Tor for a few months now and although it is the fastest anonymizer I've tried, it's still fairly slow some times. The majority of the time it is very good, and the minor lag isn't a problem, but at other times it feels like I'm back on dial-up.

I guess you can't expect it to match your current speed, but I doubt it'll be too widely used outside of the geek community or people who have a need for such things because of the unpredictability of how fast it'll be. Another reason might be that most people won't understand why it's needed/what it "does". I'm not hating on the project at all, but it's just a minor frustration. This fact aside, I've been telling as many people as I can about it.

It's been good lately, so I guess I should stop bitching.

[Deviant Ollam]

so here's a little spark of happiness that i encountered yesterday. i don't know how many people here are regular users of Tor Onion Routing (and if you don't even know what it is then by god, what rock have you been living under? go read about it right now) but i've noticed a dramatic increase in its performance since the last time i tried it out.

i first heard about Tor at one of the EFF's talks (probably at DC11 or DC12, i can't recall exactly) and was immediately impressed with the idea. i went home, setup a Tor node, and tunneled my web traffic through a proxy into the Tor network.

while i was keen on the concept, i wasn't wowed by the horrid lag that i experienced at the time. i kept the Tor tunnel in my settings (and continued operating the externally-available node out of a sense of civic duty) but pretty much just surfed in the clear with no special routing after that.

well, the other day i decided to check out the Tor network again (won't say if i was doing anything online that would require any cloaking) and was blown away by the speed. i expected the old, laggy, drag-ass bitrate i'd experienced before, but was able to surf at speeds that almost matched my day-to-day web experience. now, this may be partly because Comcast has seemed to suck harder and harder as time goes by, making Tor not all that "slow" in a relative sense. but perahps the network is really just getting more people running nodes and has a better throughput. (i'm told there are something like a few hundred nodes currently in operation now)

if you haven't tried it, check out Tor for your surfing (or other) needs. if you have any sort of broadband, open up port 9050 on your firewall and run a Tor server node. (i may setup a "how to" guide that explains the use of a tool like FireDaemon, which allows win32 users to run basic executables like services, thus eliminating annoying command-prompt windows in the taskbar.)

as simple nomad pointed out in his talk this year, using crypto or anonymizing tools can be good... but if you only ever use them on rare occasions, this in itself can be evidence used against you by those who wish to characterize you as a criminal. if you use such tools all the time, however, there is no pattern or intermitency that can come back to haunt you.