From my point of view there appears to be a huge campaign to discredit Tor or short FUD going on.
Okay, lately there appears the be a huge campaign to discredit Tor going on. The botnet, the Freedom Hosting thing.
We should fight back on that. Tor is still the best took we have and maybe these attacks are the best sign of it.
If you consider switching to a VPN like many do..
That's a bad idea. VPNs are no technology for anonymity. There are various reasons. They don't defend against various attacks, but more importantly they are owned by private entities. Did you hear of this PRISM thing? [rhetoric question] Well, guess what a private company.. even outside of the US would do if any government would ask for a backdoor, maybe even offering money.
A reason why there are these great releases about attacks on Tor is the fact that it is the best tool we have. There are attacks on it, but way less than on any comparable technology. Numerous institutions, universities, etc. work on both finding attacks and improving Tor. The Tor community is attracting the smartest people in the world, just like the NSA is. There is no other anonymity software with so many scientific papers written about it. There are attacks, none of them reaching beyond what can be done to VPNs, etc. and there are tons of improvements that are outlined, that only need a tiny bit more research or only the actual implementation. If you want to work on a real quality product for the greater good there probably is no better place than the Tor Project.
If you wanna help right now (meaning in seconds to minutes) here are some places to go.
Flashproxy seems pretty dark unless I've misunderstood it - automatically opting website visitors in to becoming a transient TOR node is deeply unethical.
Okay, lately there appears the be a huge campaign to discredit Tor going on. The botnet, the Freedom Hosting thing.
We should fight back on that. Tor is still the best took we have and maybe these attacks are the best sign of it.
If you consider switching to a VPN like many do..
That's a bad idea. VPNs are no technology for anonymity. There are various reasons. They don't defend against various attacks, but more importantly they are owned by private entities. Did you hear of this PRISM thing? [rhetoric question] Well, guess what a private company.. even outside of the US would do if any government would ask for a backdoor, maybe even offering money.
A reason why there are these great releases about attacks on Tor is the fact that it is the best tool we have. There are attacks on it, but way less than on any comparable technology. Numerous institutions, universities, etc. work on both finding attacks and improving Tor. The Tor community is attracting the smartest people in the world, just like the NSA is. There is no other anonymity software with so many scientific papers written about it. There are attacks, none of them reaching beyond what can be done to VPNs, etc. and there are tons of improvements that are outlined, that only need a tiny bit more research or only the actual implementation. If you want to work on a real quality product for the greater good there probably is no better place than the Tor Project.
If you wanna help right now (meaning in seconds to minutes) here are some places to go.
If you want to host a Tor Bridge on the cloud for free or really cheaply: https://cloud.torproject.org/
If you are using Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/
If you are using Chrome/Chromium: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cupcake/dajjbehmbn...
If you have a website/blog: http://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/
If you have more than just a few minutes: https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en