Talk:Tor (anonymity network)

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Contents 1 Requested move 1.1 Pre-move request discussions 2 Organization 3 Not supported? 4 Ban discussion? 5 On Portal:Free software, Tor is currently the selected article 6 Breaking news? 7 Thailand's ISPs block tor.eff.org website 8 help 9 Major gap in intro 10 History of TOR? 11 Free Software 12 Clarification of its protection from Traffic Analysis 13 License: 3-clause BSD.

[edit] Requested move

Page now moved StephenHildrey 15:17, 28 October 2005 (UTC)

Tor is not an "anonymous network" - it has a name. As a named network that provides anonymity, the page title is currently incorrect.

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Add *Support or *Oppose followed by an optional one sentence explanation, then sign your vote with ~~~~

• Support as original move proposer. StephenHildrey 17:55, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
• Support - correctness is a virtue. In my opinion, you could have been bold and moved without discussion, since the justification is indisputable. Haakon 19:22, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
  • It won't let me move the page because my account is too new :-( StephenHildrey 19:27, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
    • Oh, interesting, I didn't know of such restrictions :-) Haakon 19:58, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
• Support. The Tor developers also refer to it as an "anonymity network", not an "anonymous network". Victor Lighthill 23:20, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Pre-move request discussions

I think "Tor (anonymity network)" would be a better title than the current "Tor (anonymous network)". Thoughts? --StephenHildrey 16:25, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

...Are you even allowed to use the word anonymity in that fashion? Regardless, I think "Tor (anonymous network)" is far more intuitive than your proposal. --Maru (talk) Contribs 17:37, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "allowed to use" - to me it makes more sense to say "anonymity network" than "anonymous network" because the network is not "anonymous", it provides anonymity. Still, checking Google ([[1]] vs [[2]]) suggests that most people agree with you.

I meant grammatically. Anonymity doesn't seem to work as an adjective describing the kind of network, to me. --Maru (talk) Contribs 00:08, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

The construction "NOUN Network" to mean "A network used for NOUN" is pretty common. "Communication network," "intelligence network," and so on appear regularly in the NY Times and other newspapers. Also, the usage "anonymity network" is common in the anonymous communications field (whose participants do anonymity research, not necessarily anonymous research). But in any case, "anonymous network" is certainly wrong, for the reasons given above. If you won't accept "anonymity network", "anonymous communication network" or "network for anonymity" could be accurate. --Victor Lighthill 17:14, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

Good point. Also, "anonymous network" means "network without a name", which Tor clearly isn't - it's "the Tor network".

Actually, the proper description is an "anonymizing overlay network". Afecks 10:31, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Organization

Anyone want to take a crack at organizing this article a little better??? As the Tor entry continues to grow, it will seem increasingly haphazard and disorganized.

I feel that the last part of the article, especially talking about specific lines to uncomment in Tor configuration files, is far too much detail for an overview article like this.

I've had a first attempt, though I think it still needs a lot of work to add useful information. Hopefully people will find it more cohesive now, anyway. --StephenHildrey 12:41, 26 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Not supported?

"As of late 2005, the EFF no longer sponsors the Tor project..." What does this mean? Does anyone have any details on this?

See the second paragraph of "Tor: Donate!". b0at 11:25, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

The page now says "As of October 2005, EFF no longer has any money for supporting the Tor project.", so it was a money thing, not political support. Gronky 15:35, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

That doesn't mean it wasn't political: EFF could have made a political decision to divide their pot of money in a way that excluded Tor :) </pedantic> StephenFalken 19:09, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

EFF still provides webhosting and legal advice to the Tor project; just not cash. Naturally, all budgeting decisions are in some sense political (in that the EFF, presented with lower-than-expected funds, 'could' have decided to cut lawyers rather than Tor. But there has been no political break between the projects (or if there has, it does not seem to be documented anywhere. -- Victor Lighthill 20:57, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Ban discussion?

Is there a discussion of why connections from some of the Tor exit nodes have been blocked from editing wikipedia content available anywhere?

I was looking for it somewhere. See Wikipedia:No open proxies. However, it appears that the decision was unilaterally taken by a very low number of people who are blocking those open proxies. I'm not sure all Wikipedians approve with this policy, I certainly don't! 212.112.231.83 18:15, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

what the internet needs is free, closed proxies, like requiring a password. [Unsigned Anon User]

I think it is horrible that Tor is outright banned. A better option would be moderation. But what bothers me the most about the banning is that I can still be logged in and get refused access. This doesn't make any sense. If I log in to my account, why ban me because of the IP? I prefer Tor for privacy reasons and it is helpful for free speech. About discussion, you might wish to check - I think it was the tor mailing list archives from a year or so back. I believe I recall discussion on the ban. Nisanu 15:33, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] On Portal:Free software, Tor is currently the selected article

(2006-09-02) Just to let you know. The purpose of selecting an article is both to point readers to the article and to highlight it to potential contributors. It will remain on the portal for a week or so. The previous selected article was GNOME. Gronky 14:35, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Tor's time has passed, the selected article is now PuTTY. Gronky 21:22, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Breaking news?

German police are apparently seizing TOR servers. - BalthCat 00:36, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

This is a tempest in a teapot. As far as anybody can tell (as discussed on the Tor list), the seizures are part of a kiddie porn sweep where dozens of hundreds of computers were grabbed. No Tor server operator has been charged, or seems likely to be charged. Current consensus seems to be that server ops will get their servers back once the cops realize the servers have no useful evidencce on them, and put them back up again (with different public keys, of course). Though many conspiracy theories are circulating about the cops' "real" motives for doing this, it doesn't seem that any of these are substantiated. -- Victor Lighthill 18:56, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

A lot of news is that they were in fact TOR Exit-Nodes which can show ip addresses in server logs. --- Allix Davis Mon Sep 18 16:29:13 BST 2006

How is that news? Wouldn't they be exit-nodes almost by definition? -- Gwern (contribs) 15:59, 18 September 2006 (UTC)

This i beleive is the main source of the news in english at least. http://itnomad.wordpress.com/2006/09/10/germany-crackdown-on-tor-node-operators/ I can of course speculate and defend tors anonymity, but it would worry alot of tor users confidence, especially in countries where legimate use of tor is needed, eg.. china --- Allix Davis Wed Sep 20 01:07:03 BST 2006

[edit] Thailand's ISPs block tor.eff.org website

When access to http://tor.eff.org/ via Thailand's ISPs, it will show you a message:

Not Found

The requested URL /favicon.ico was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

see 2006 Thailand coup d'état#Internet_censorship

The Tor website has been blocked in Thailand since well before the coup. Fortunately for users in Thailand, there are mirrors. ( http://tor.eff.org/mirrors.html.en ) --Victor Lighthill 03:09, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

as of now, i was able to access the Tor site Roger jg 08:29, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] help

i install tor and go to whatismyip.com and wut i see is the same ip that i saw before i install tor. isnt tor sopposed to make it different? 195.225.104.228

Not the place to discuss how you did or did not mess up the installation. --Gwern (contribs) 14:18, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

where would i get support? when i go to tor.eff.org, all the instances of the word support that i see refer to providing finincal support to them - not in getting support. ne ideas? 195.225.104.228 02:21, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

Your friendly tech guru or forum or mailing list, I would guess. Not an encyclopedia. --Gwern (contribs) 02:38, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

There is a question on the Tor FAQ at [3] about getting support, but there is also (I think) an answer to your original question. But of course, you read the documentation before you decided to ask random people on the Internet to read it for you, right? -- Victor Lighthill 14:48, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

why are so many people here so horribly full of themselves? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 210.7.9.212 (talk • contribs).

And why are there so many people elsewhere so horribly selfish and clueless? --Gwern (contribs) 17:59 18 December 2006 (GMT)

not everybody is a computer genius, I've been having problems as well. And I did read the support and FAQ pages.. it just gets so confusing when they start talking about ORports and all that crap, it makes no sense to some people like me who aren't experts on computer networking. Anyway, you can say I'm "horribly selfish and clueless" as much as you want, but that doesn't change the fact that the Tor support pages are nearly useless to the people who actually need them. Most of what I read consisted of "Just go here and disable these ports, enable these ones, and edit this file." and that was about as detailed as it got. --Krakko 22:57, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

For what it's worth, in my opinion the documentation for Tor is more than adequate for most purposes. At least, its documentation is much better than most other software I've happened to use. And the documentation is constantly improving. Documentation is frequently neglected too much by software developers, but the Tor community has done a lot to make sure that isn't the case with Tor. I mean, just look at the list of documentation already written, including an expansive wiki. But you must consider that the Tor software is not a bunch of magic, that to use the software effectively, there are some things the user must understand, and that means reading docs. Without an adequate understanding of what's going on, you may be leaving yourself vulnerable. --Robomojo 06:37, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Major gap in intro

What was the motive of the United States government in the initial development of Tor? What is their current view of the project? 198.247.174.254 01:23, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

The Navy's stated goals were to give their analysts a way to browse anonymously webpages without *.mil addresses showing up. The point behind releasing it publicly was to increase security simply because of increased traffic by many more and more geographically dispersed persons. I haven't added this since I honestly don't remember where I read that. --Gwern (contribs) 04:45 9 February 2007 (GMT)

[edit] History of TOR?

Intro mentions a few recent developments, but I would like to see other information such as how long TOR has existed, major changes in the project, etc. 128.195.75.51 16:01, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Free Software

This and many other free software pages are being vandalized by an anonymous user by the IP 142.151.175.39 (contribs), repeatedly adding "and open source" to "this is free software". We all know OS is a subset of FS, so adding this is superfluous, and seems a bit biased to me. — Isilanes 15:07, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Isn't it the other way? All free software is open source but not all open source is free software... --Gwern (contribs) 23:22 22 February 2007 (GMT)

Free software and "osi certified" (bare with me) are two sets with 99.x% overlap. There is one licence that is free software but not osi certified (the NPL), and there's two or three licences that are osi certified but not free software (one RealNetworks licence, one old version of the APSL). Of those three licences that are not in both categories, two are not used for any software, and one is used for one part of one software package that is not widely used. So it's safe to say the two categories are the same.

BUT, "osi certified" is not a universally accepted definition of "open source" for software, and OSI have not been outspoken in correcting mis-uses of the term. So "open source" has been allowed to become fuzzy. So in the interests of precision, when something is described as "open source" - it should be noted that the software is free software (if it indeed is free software). But even better would be to leave out the fuzzy term and just say that the software is free software (if it is). Gronky 09:17, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

• Gwern is right, or at least he understood what I meant (correct or not), which is not exactly what I say. What I meant is that the specifications of OS are a subset of those of FS, and therefore if something is FS, it goes implied that it is also OS. Reading Gronky's reply, maybe I am technically wrong, but I had the idea that it is widely recognized that all FS is OS, but not all OS is FS, as Gwern says. — Isilanes 09:48, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

It looks like some people here are walking precariously close to Wikipedia:3RR. Since Tor's webpages describe it as free software, but its license confirms both to DFSG and to OSI guidelines, both terms apply uncontroversially. "Free and Open Source" would IMO be a fine thing to say. Please take your edit war to [Alternative terms for free software] and make a substantive improvement there instead? -- Victor Lighthill 04:15, 14 March 2007 (UTC)

• Tor also complies with "it has more than 10 lines of source code", "it was written mostly or totally in ASCII", "it's a three-letter word" and "begins with T". ¿Are you implying that these facts should also be mentioned? Tor is free software. Compare that to saying that "Tor is a square". Saying "Tor is a four-sided polygon" is also technically correct, but Tor is not just any 4s polygon: it is a square. Saying "Tor is a square and a four-sided polygon" is hopelessly redundant, and may only be interpreted as POV-pushing by supporters of the "four-sided" religion. This can not be accepted. — Isilanes 16:21, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Your analogy does not seem apropos. Nobody cares about the category of "begins with T" or "written totally or mostly in ascii." Enough people care about the category of "Free software" and enough people care about the category of "Open-source software" that projects that meet both definitions often call themselves both in order to communicate clearly with people who aren't quite sure of the differences between them. You seem to be convinced that these projects are foolish to do so, and I realize that this is a religious matter for a lot of the people here, but in the end, I think NPOV should prevail. -- Victor Lighthill 16:46, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

• My (first) analogy is a reductio ad absurdum, and illustrates the point that data should not be included on the sole base that it is correct. My second analogy (squares and 4s polygons), is a second reductio, intended to illustrate that terms that correspond to a set and a subset should not be both included. Just the most accurate and exact one should. Moreover, you state that [...]projects that meet both definitions often call themselves both in order to communicate clearly with people[...]. You seem to forget that the very open source term was invented with a clear agenda of substituting the term free software, which sounded too "leftist" for some, and drove some corporations away from free software, because it wasn't a term with a good "business sound". Fact is that "free software" is the original, unbiased, self-explanatory term for free software, and others (outstandingly "open source") are marketing campaigns that Wikipedia shouldn't support. — Isilanes 00:47, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Clarification of its protection from Traffic Analysis

As a network security newbie, I was reading about Traffic Analysis and ended up here. Anyway, in the intro, it says Tor is vulnerable to Correlation Analysis (which links to Traffic Analysis). But later, it says Tor was developed to help defeat Traffic Analysis. It's not really a contradiction, but the article basically says it's vulnerable to something it tries to defeat. Could this be clarified? Polihale 20:18, 6 March 2007 (UTC) —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Polihale (talk • contribs) 20:18, 6 March 2007 (UTC).

[edit] License: 3-clause BSD.

I see that 76.183.142.216 has [changed the page] to say that Tor is no longer licensed under the 3-clause BSD license. But as far as I can see, this is not actually the case. The Tor license is here: [[4]]. That looks like 3-clause BSD to me, and the Tor developers don't seem to have announced a license change. What is your source for saying that the license is not 3-clause BSD? -- Victor Lighthill 00:45, 21 March 2007 (UTC)