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Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

Genuine question: Why would you use Tor to connect to Lemmy?

Tor is an incredibly useful tool to work around organization supported firewalls.

Employer: Don’t try to work around your employer’s protections. It just takes one bored IT person to make a call and you are fired
College/Family: There are stronger arguments for this but I suspect you are in a “suboptimal” situation if you are dealing with that and… yeah
Government: This is the big use of Tor and why I still generally suggest it, even if I have many concerns with the ethics of the system and its supporters. And let’s drill down to that

If you are doing stuff on Lemmy that your government would not approve of: STOP!!! We have stories of twitter and other social media sites outright volunteering information to authoritarian governments while having a CEO spew hate and vitriol on an hourly basis. And those are large companies with at least some degree of oversight.

Lemmy is instances hosted and managed by people in their off time. And you know almost nothing about those admins.

So if you are saying or looking at anything that you would not want the public to know: Do not fucking do it on Lemmy.

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twistypencil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
On mobile, so have to be short: I don’t want to leak my IP to every random site that hosts am image and shows up in my feed. I use tor for everything, and turning it off to browse lemmy.world is pointless.

Tor is useful for more than just getting around your work firewall.

Look into tor browser, tracking cookies is only the beginning.

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- Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Again, what are you actually protecting yourself on by preventing random sites from seeing your IP?
  
  Information your IP conveys:
  
  Probably what ISP you have
  
  Probably your general location unless you have gone out of your way to have a static IP for your home (in a way that is not just asking/paying your ISP for it)
  
  So unless you have a very non-standard internet set up, it basically lets me know you are in Faketown, New Jersey. Which is not particularly useful information. And likely has already been conveyed to anyone you care about because of the tracking cookie for said Dominos.
  
  The reason why this CAN be an issue and you see streamers block their IPs: DDOS attacks exist. But if you are going to websites that are likely to DDOS the visitors for poops and giggles… maybe consider going to different sites? Or, yeah, that is a use case for tor.
  
  But the idea of putting ALL traffic through tor (just like ALL traffic through a vpn) just… mostly defeats the purpose of it because you are still making a nice and easily tracked “profile”. And it is very clear that site admins can detect what is tor so that they don’t assume you are regularly traveling between Faketown and Luxemburg or whtaever.
  
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  - twistypencil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Sorry, I cannot possibly match your asymmetric post length in my replies. I’ll simply leave it at: I want to use Tor, for a lot of different reasons, not all of them are you going to eventually uncover with your argumentation, because I don’t plan on talking about them, not because they are illegal. If you don’t want to use it, then fine, its not for you.
    
    I do not agree with you that using tor actually compromises you, but if you do, then go ahead and keep believing that. Seemed to work fairly well for Snowden, and quite a lot of others who depend on it daily.
    
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    Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    You have yet to refute a single point and the extent of your argument is “I want it”.
    
    Also, Snowden, really? The guy who got caught and had the Espionage Act thrown at him, fled to Russia, and now lives there until the end of his days? Putting his shit posting and memes through tor isn’t protecting him. Him being more useful to Russia as a political pawn than as currency to give to the US government is what keeps him safe.
    
    But, and I realize this might be hard for you to understand: Tor is incredibly useful for some activities (I even said I suggest it to others in the comments you refuse to read). But the more you do through Tor as “you”, the more of a profile there is which lets anyone who actually cares about you track you down.
    
    Need to blow a whistle: Tor can be a good tool for that. But only if you are doing it from an identity that has never been linked to any of your personal identities AND the data doesn’t contain anything that is identifiable either (that last bit being Snowden’s problem, if I remember correctly).
    
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twistypencil@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship…

Governments use the internet for social control, through both surveillance and censorship. Many countries, such as China, Iran, and even the United States practice active surveillance of the social relationships of everyone. They then sell that data to companies, and then that data gets sold to the US government to work around 4th amendment protections (wired.com/…/odni-commercially-available-informati…)

Internet service providers happily cooperate with government repression, they practice intrusive monitoring of your traffic through deep packet inspection, they track your DNS usage, and they get people thrown in jail, expelled from school, or banned from the internet, sometimes just for ‘copyright infringement’.

Corporations have discovered how to make money from the internet: surveillance. By tracking your online habits, advertising companies build detailed profiles of your individual behavior in order to better sell you junk, Every single major internet ad company now uses behavioral tracking.

Tor isn’t the only way to get around these things, but it is one tool in the arsenal. The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and the fact that I can run my own lemmy is a huge plus, which is what I probably will be doing if lemmy.world continues to block Tor, but that is a selfish solution, and doesn’t help my friend’s in countries with restrictive internet.

I’m not interested in stopping doing stuff on lemmy because the government doesn’t approve of it. Political repression doesn’t mean I should also be profiled or have my speech restricted. I want to be able to help people find abortion support in my state, where it is illegal, and I want to do that without worrying about ending up in some kind of purge list because the GOP becomes full fascist sometime in the next couple years.

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- Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Who are the admin team of lemmy.world? From a quick glance, at least a few of the staff have photos (whether that is them or not is anyone’s guess).
  
  What are their political backgrounds?
  
  How likely are they to stand up against an aggressive government who wants information on people who are circumventing an abortion ban?
  
  How likely are they to assist said government?
  
  And, most importantly
  
  Even if you have satisfactory answers to all of the above, how much do you trust that the new sysadmins that are being recruited meet the same requirements?
  
  The fediverse is amazing as a tool to decouple social media and discourse from corporations (even if that can be coopted. Facebook is already trying). It is a HORRIBLE tool from an infosec perspective. Because instance admins can more or less see EVERYTHING you do. And even if you trust your own instance, you have no guarantees that the PMs you are sending a user on a different instance are protected either.
  
  So, like I said in the other post you ignored after seeing one sentence, if you are doing ANYTHING where the government or even the general public finding out can hurt you: Don’t fucking do it on Lemmy.
  
  This reminds me way too much of bitcoin back in the day. People figured that because it was not “controlled” by credit card companies and governments that they were fully anonymous. When the reality was that the ledger is public record and you don’t even need a warrant to search through it. And even if you are smart enough to use a tumbler or five: There is a reason that so much funding went in to graph analysis, if you catch my drift.
  
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FirstMajesticComet@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
The fact that you are assuming someone wants to use Tor on Lemmy to do something illegal shows that you have fallen prey to the idea that Tor itself is illegal or meant for illegal activity, it’s the driving force behind many of the pushes to block Tor or even to attempt to extinguish it.

Fact of the matter is Tor is a tool, a tool that like any is not inherently evil or illegal. Tor’s purpose also isn’t to facilitate illegal activity, its purpose is to provide privacy and anonymity to people who want it. It sounds to me like you have been listening to a lot of those “scary” deep web videos or assuming people use Tor for those reasons and not for legitimate privacy and security reasons, (like for example did you know that Lemmy doesn’t proxy images?). This is one thing I really hate about those types of content, they portray the idea of privacy and security as if it’s evil or nefarious, or that the idea of hosting your own hidden service is creepy or wrong, it’s really gross actually, all for clicks and views, but they push it as if it’s real, it’s harmful to services like Lemmy which are currently outside of the mainstream and probably are associated with Dark web contend just by virtue of not being Big tech products, for a while I’d heard similar stories about linux too (people talked about how linux is for criminals, glad that one didn’t catch on).

TL;DR you shouldn’t be assuming that people want to use Tor (a privacy and security tool) for nefarious or evil purposes due to it’s reputation with nontechnical people, especially when those people are known for spreading misleading or even wrong information about the subject itself.

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