this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Privacy
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@CrypticCoffee Counter to that is obvious: DO NOT USE legal access modes, use Tor instead and access only sites that "block" the UK instead of complying.
Hopefully most porn sites will do exactly that, like Pornhub already did to US states that demand driver's license uploads (including Utah and Arkansa). When they attempted to comply with such a demand from Louisiana, open traffic from there dropped 80% and presumably VPN and Tor access jumped.
This told all porn sites that it's not worth the programmer time to even attempt to service legal traffic from such jurisdictions. Block non-Tor/non-VPN connections and enjoy immunity.
Best of all, it only takes ONE jurisdiction on the whole planet that won't censor porn to make these measures globally ineffective. Crack anywhere, play everywhere. This gives new meaning to saying "fuck you" to the government.
Any attempt by the UK to block Tor will fail: China can't reliably block it, and the Great Firewall of China has far more resources than "Hadrian's Firewall." Trying to jail people for using Tor would be nearly as difficult and would also face the legal obstacle of jury nullification. This will go the way of the failed 21 drinking age and 55 mph speed limits in the US.
As governments try to crack down on porn, on dissent, and on criticism of their Great Leaders, the clearnet will be of declining importance (possibly used only for shopping) and the darknet will become more important. Embrace the power of the darknet...
https://torproject.org
Tor can be compromised though, you just need someone watching a good portion of the end nodes and hosting the fastest intermediate nodes, then run a viterbi trace back to a source. Tor is also very slow.
I'm looking at IPFS and FreeNet as viable alternatives
@tetris11 Slow yes, but if you download videos rather than stream them, slow is much less of an issue.
Even the US is not capable of watching all Tor exit and guard nodes. The UK sure as hell is not. The Torproject by the way is always looking for and decommissioning malicious Tor nodes, so the risk to any one user is low.
The usual way to attack a Tor user is to get them to connect to Tor to destination site you have compromised with javascript ON, then send a malware installer to the real target's computer. The installer then downloads a rather standard payload that tells the computer to phone home on a non-Tor connection. The widely reported 2013 incident used a Windows-only payload, today they probably add iOS and Android. Stock android that is. If it was reasonably practical for cops to see through Tor they would not put so much effort in seeing around it instead.
Things like the Silk Road takedown were very time consuming and labor-intensive, and required a lot of old fashioned exploits and unskilled admins at the targets. In other words, Tor, Signal, anything else running on an untrusted device also become untrusted. Silk Road was still brutally difficult for the cops, and that was a major, motivated investigation that unlike UK or Utah porn cops wasn't going to run into a stone wall of non-extraditability or lack of jurisidiction on someone with zero local "business presence."
BTW, do not use Google Fiber to connect to Tor to use Google privately, because if you do, Google can see your device directly(being your ISP), and see the one exit node they are talking to, allowing a confirmation attack.