Tweet
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.
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.
Comment