cumlord wrote on August 13, 2024 at 5:30 AM

I've always assumed that it's monitored to some degree. Not like all tor users can be monitored clearly at all times, but from the aspect that running tor doesn't make you nsa proof. nothing does, but it does a good job at making you blend in, so when i want to look like everyone else and not do something identifiable, tor doesn't seem so bad. i think that's probably it's best use case, when what you chose to do with it would be like a needle in a haystack identifying you, but it can't correct for user error.

good to see new people interested in this kind of stuff even if they show you they just logged into their bank account with tor. they got the right spirit i guess.

Saint_Cuthbert OP wrote on August 15, 2024 at 9:36 PM

There are only some odd-thousand tor nodes out there. For a powerful adversary to run many of them doesn't seem too unbelievable (50 cent army). They may not be able to hire someone to watch each and every node al the time, but they could possibly automate the process with artificial intelligence.

The Whonix documentation discusses how Tor users can be fingerprinted by their typing speed, among other things. And remember that it wasn't public knowledge that emails and phone calls could be tracked on a large scale until somewhat recently. In The Art of War is says to make your enemy think that you're weak when you're strong and strong when you're weak.

cumlord wrote on August 16, 2024 at 5:50 AM

Pretty much. tor is comparatively centralized and a lot more high profile than i2p. Fingerprinting is the thing that scares me the most, there's lots of identifiable metrics. Also instructive to look at how people have gotten deanon in the past but it doesn't anticipate the future or current capabilities. I'd think they'd spend the most energy targeting or trying to compromise high value targets/individuals like marketplaces/admins for the intel they could attain over a long period and we would be none the wiser. even if they don't have a big picture view of everything right now there's lots of tools that can be used to focus in on something of interest. I guess a good defense is to not be of interest.