this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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Privacy
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Briar doesn't make sense to me because you're trading a central server for a central service... If tor is down, you can't message. It's the same POF as cellular, which is insane to me.
TOR isn't a centralized service, it's a distributed network.
It's also a specific procol, which can absolutely be blocked. I don't know where this notion that it's impossible to block tor because it was designed to be censorship resistant came from, but you can absolutely stop people from using it.
It's not even that hard and there's nothing end users can do about it if they don't know how to circumvent it...
Being able to be blocked is a completely different thing than being centralized service.
I mean, if users don't know how to circumvent something, by definition there is nothing that they can do about it.
However, unless this hypothetical censoring country is blocking all encrypted network traffic it is trivial to access TOR via a VPN or an SSH tunnel
It can be blocked, but blocking bridges is a constant whack-a-mole (especially now that they have Webtunnel which, while apparently not as robust as some dedicated obfuscation solutions, is still a noticeable improvement). My bigger problem with Briar is that both recipients have to be online to message, or you have to set up a "mailbox".
tor is decentralized, if someone's tor server goes down you just go to another.
You're missing the point. Of course tor is decentralized, but the tor protocol can be locked at which time you have no connectivity at all... Your super secure messenger doesn't work. It makes no sense.
"the tor protocol can be locked" ?
Unless you obfuscate tor traffic, it's trivial to block it via any number of IDS products. The entirety of public tor exit nodes are publicly available: https://check.torproject.org/torbulkexitlist
Here's tor exit node blocking in production with 14 lines of bash...
It's significantly easier than you've obviously been led to believe. When it becomes not easy is when someone understands the protocol and understands how to circumvent these measures, but I can assure you that 99.8% of all tor users don't fall within that category...
Bridges are trivial to use tho. And even if they get blocked too actively, a lot of people in such censored regions have a VPN anyway (although I still don't have an understanding whether a VPN decreases Tor's security if used like this.
oh sure, but you can get around these blocks and this sort of block is ultimately always a possibility short of building your own network infrastructure. and as blocks like that become more common it becomes more common to circumvent them too.
"significantly harder than youve been lead to believe", no, you just werent clear in your description of the problem. if your problem with tor is "governments can play whack-a-mole blocking ips and traffic" there is no technology which doesnt have that as a downside.
They create a better ad, so they create a better adblock, which forces them to discover anti-adblock methods, which forces adblocker's to adapt, which forces anti-adblocker's to adapt, ad infinitum.
This isn't anything new. Of course you can circumvent these blocks, but they can always adapt to make them useful again. It's not a good argument at all.
Yes, i point out whackamole in my comment. It's a completely useless critique of tor/briar because there is no alternative which cannot also be critiqued like this, and there can never be.
you might as well say "well the problem with keyboards is that someone needs to ship it to you."