On 7 October 2010 18:26, Al Haraka <[email protected]> wrote: >> But hiding your real IP from the server is only one part of tor. The >> other is encrypting and obscuring the destination of all traffic so >> that your ISP/government/etc can't listen in. This is what makes it >> useful for people in places like Iran and China. They don't care about >> hiding their IP from twitter. They care about getting around the >> censorship and surveillance put in place by the government. > > It is sad how often people get this wrong. Tor only encrypts traffic > between endpoints *within* the network created. As soon as it leaves > the endpoint, which it inevitably does, it is just like normal > traffic. Tor used to be much louder about their "we do not encrypt, > only obfuscate IP address" vibe a while back, but now the footnotes > seem much more muted.[1] It is well-known that people operate exit > nodes for less than altruistic reasons, for "research" and otherwise. > [2] I do not have a link on me right now, but there has been a lot of > paranoia regarding intel agencies of different nations running exit > nodes for snooping on traffic. I will be honest and call it that > because I have never seen any evidence. > > I think this is important distinction to make, and Tor developers have > always been honest that Tor is a false sense of security *when trusted > unto itself as your only tool*. Please read the links and be > informed. Since this list has lots of subscribers, some might not > read the fine print of such assertions. If I am wrong, please feel > free to correct me.
In the case of OSM contributors this isn't relevant, is it? The (almost proverbial) chinese government may see someone logging in to OpenStreetMap and adding traces and/or map data for China, but they won't know who it is and won't be able to persecute. It sucks that freenode and wikipedia are unfriendly to Tor. By blocking Tor exit node IPs they block not only people connecting through Tor, but also people operating exit nodes. I've been able to get a whitelist entry on Wikipedia but not on freenode (despite its advertised Tor friendliness, almost any other irc network is easier to use than freenode). Cheers _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
