EFF to sponsor Tor
p2pnet.net News:- The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) says it will sponsor Tor, a technology project created to help organizations and individuals communication with each other anonymously online.
“Tor is a network-within-a-network that protects communication from a form of surveillance known as “traffic analysis,” says the EFF, adding:
“Traffic analysis tracks where data goes and when, as well as how much is sent, rather than the content of communications.
“Knowing the source and destination of Internet traffic allows others to track a person’s behavior and interests. This can impact privacy in obvious and secondary ways. For example, an e-commerce site could choose to charge you more for particular items based on your country or institution of origin. It could also threaten your job or physical safety by revealing who and where you are.”
Tor says people can use it to keep remote websites from tracking them and family members, as well as to connect to resources such as news sites or instant messaging services blocked by their local ISPs.
But it can’t solve all anonymity problems, it says on its web site, adding:
“It focuses only on protecting the transport of data. You need to use protocol-specific support software if you don’t want the sites you visit to see your identifying information. For example, you can use web proxies such as Privoxy while web browsing to block cookies and withhold information about your browser type.
Also, to protect your anonymity, be smart. Don’t provide your name or other revealing information in web forms. Be aware that, like all anonymizing networks that are fast enough for web browsing, Tor does not provide protection against end-to-end timing attacks: If your attacker can watch the traffic coming out of your computer, and also the traffic arriving at your chosen destination, he can use statistical analysis to discover that they are part of the same circuit.
===================
See:-
anonymously - EFF Joins Forces with Tor Software Project, EFF, December 18, 2004
December 22nd, 2004 at 1:57 am
Unfortunately, Tor isn’t able to handle large amounts of data as of yet. It will be great when the infrastructure will be there to facilitate file sharing. Tor has the potential to be the RIAA’s and MPAA’s worst nightmare
December 22nd, 2004 at 4:46 am
worse than that.. packet shaping used in universities will be rendered utterly useless if i’m reading this correctly. No more communist universities!
December 22nd, 2004 at 10:05 am
That would be great, but it’s not for today.
It could however be used in the future BY p2p applications,
for example by routing TCP connections through Tor.
“Non-goals
In favoring simple, deployable designs, we have explicitly deferred several possible goals, either because they are solved elsewhere, or because they are not yet solved.
Not peer-to-peer: Tarzan and MorphMix aim to scale to completely decentralized peer-to-peer environments with thousands of short-lived servers, many of which may be controlled by an adversary. This approach is appealing, but still has many open problems [24,43].
[24]
M. J. Freedman and R. Morris. Tarzan: A peer-to-peer anonymizing network layer. In 9th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS 2002), Washington, DC, November 2002.
[43]
M. Rennhard and B. Plattner. Practical anonymity for the masses with morphmix. In A. Juels, editor, Financial Cryptography. Springer-Verlag, LNCS (forthcoming), 2004.”
http://tor.eff.org/cvs/tor/doc/design-paper/tor-design.html