Tangentially related xkcd
Nobody should ever feel like this. Privacy is a right. I use VPN’s exclusively purely because I don’t want my ISP to mine me for information, then sell it to the highest bidder.
I agree privacy is a right.
The government definitely disagrees though. So yes you should be wary of rawdogging a Tor connection, unfortunately
So what’s the proper way? Tor plus VPN?
In my opinion yes as long as you have one that is actually trustworthy. Mullvad comes to mind since it famously got raided and was found by authorities to keep zero logs like they promised.
Tor developers disagree but I think this is from the ideology that “it isn’t illegal to use Tor!!” Which is correct but it absolutely does make you a target in any of the 14 eyes countries and beyond.
Don’t listen to the bad advice about combining VPNs with TOR. You are a thousand times more likely to fuck up your VPN configuration and make it vulnerable. Therefore you’re better off just sticking with TOR which has been very carefully thought through by a lot of very smart people for decades.
Would be nice, but most people wouldn’t know where to start, so 90% of that map would be white instead of pink
That’s the joke.
No it isn’t.
We should all argue about it.
I must be going crazy because it’s definitely not the joke. This joke is so geared toward the IT crowd. I could walk up and down my block and guarantee I’m the only person who knows how to use TOR, and maybe even the only one who’s heard of it.
Welcome to Lemmy, baby!!!
I agree. But I’ll also add that the joke itself should be pretty accessible even outside the IT crowd. It’s said clearly in the text of the final panel, and even in the title of the post. The only thing an average person might not know to get the joke is that you use TOR to get on the darknet, but I think most people would figure that out from the context.
If I had to guess how 33 people could upvote “That’s the joke,” I’d say maybe people got the joke, as intended when reading the comic, but then, upon seeing “That’s the joke”, somehow just lost their minds and forgot what the joke was. Is that the power of memes?
Personally, I think saying “That’s the joke,” as it’s intended, to somebody who made a mistake and misunderstood the joke is mildly patronizing and rude, on the level of teasing. Not completely polite, but not outlandish for anonymous internet posts.
But to say “That’s the joke” to somebody who very likely did get the joke seems outlandishly rude. Maybe that’s just me.
I typed a response and deleted it because Jerboa isn’t great about showing what I’m responding to. But yeah, you said no it isn’t and I totally agree with you. And I am firmly on board of chastising people who speak with authority when they’re plainly wrong, such as the person to whom you were responding.
So yeah, I think that’s the joke is bad when that is the joke. I think it’s even worse when it’s not the joke and you’re wrong.
I sure do love Lemmy, though. Brings me back to my early forum days when conversation was pointless, like this one!
Lol I’m using Tor now just for the lols. I literally just do nothing illegal but excersise constitutionally protected free speech. I intentionally do not post any actual threats, so if they manage to track me down, it’s gonna be so funny all they find is “orange donald is a big dum dum”
Straight to the internment camp with you
1942: Japanese Americans put in camps, in response to US joining war against Imperial Japan
2025: Chinese Americans put in camps, in response to (a hypothetical) US war against CCP-led China
Villified by both sides, labeled as a “traitor” by both sides, when all you want is to live a life in peace.
Only about 80 year part
I’m about to experience history 👀
Edit: I just noticed, yesterday was December 7th… 👀
Welp, hopefully there is no war… cuz I don’t wanna die yet. Not like this.
No one wants to bomb Hawaii anymore. But Guam might be on their shortlist
It’s only constitutionally protected for those who further the administration’s agenda.
Too late, I pissed off another country already. Now now it’s two. Getting on two countries watchlists, it’s an honor.
American suburbs, so strange
Walkable cities with public transportation infrastructure, so strange.
nft pfp. so strange
npn pnp. So strange
nah they’re pretty straight forward. it’s just 2 pn junctions :p
Anonymity loves company.
I just learned that’s a thing from this post.
I think it’s pretty worthwhile being paranoid about Tor. Not because of hackers, but because of the government, they are clearly watching all the forums and markets there very closely, setting up agents and honeypots. Tor itself may or may not be secure, you never really know for sure. For pretty much all legal privacy usecases, a VPN is enough, and much more performant
You don’t necessarily need to use it to visit obscure onion services, you can also just use it to post on Lemmy, i.e. like a VPN, except without a VPN provider that can know which domains you connect to.
But if you’ve logged in to an account before on the regular web, then you can still be tracked because theres that connection between clearnet you and Tor you right? Or am I making stuff up
Yes, you’re correct. If you want to be hidden you need to only log into accounts that you’ve only accessed through TOR. IIRC, TOR actually tells you this when you open it for the first time, or at least it used to. It also tells you things like to not resize the window, because window size is a fingerprint that can be used to identify you. You shouldn’t full-screen or resize it. There’s a lot of ways to identify people that they don’t even think about.
Hmm alright, thanks
For that particular site.
But the big thing about using Tor for normal things is that doing so helps to obfuscate traffic that governments want to track by surrounding it with “legitimate” traffic
Sort of, as in, the site you’re logging into will know that you’re the same person. Obviously if it’s something like Lemmy, if you post public comments then everybody else will see that it’s the same person posting them. It used to be the case that your exit node could also see quite a bit of what you were viewing, which can indeed often be linked to things you did outside of Tor, unless the website you’re connecting to was using HTTPS. Nowadays, practically every website does that, so you should be good.
That said, I am not a security person, so if you’re a journalist protecting their sources or otherwise have a serious threat model, seek expert advice.
Hmm. So I’d have to limit it to stuff that I don’t have logins for?
Presumably, if you log in to a site, you want it to know who you are, so I think that’s fine. (Where “who you are” means “that whatever you do while logged in is being done by the same person as who did other things when logged in outside of Tor”.) So no, I don’t think you need to limit it to stuff you don’t have logins for. I’d only make sure to not login/visit a site if Tor browser actively tells you that it’s insecure (which it does when a site doesn’t use HTTPS), which is pretty obvious.
And for free!
I’ve read that there are more effective ways to deanonymize tor traffic that goes through exit nodes, as opposed to accessing onion services which is more secure
Yeah it’s a spectrum, which basically runs from regular browsing -> VPN -> Tor browser for regular sites -> Tor browser for
.onionsites. (And note that even.onionsites don’t need to be obscure Silk Road type sites - for example, this is DuckDuckGo. That’s still a legal privacy use case.)
Thats been my concern whenever people tell me “just use tor its totally anonymous” like theres no way I can possibly verify that. I would assume its being monitored way more than the regular traffic
