Re:Issues with corporate censorship and mass surveillance
by mike_hearn on Tuesday February 23, 2016 @05:37AM
(#11157936)
I have the utmost respect for people fighting censorship, whether they're on the inside breaking out or on the outside breaking in.
But the idea that only Tor can be used to fight censorship is a false equivalence. If you look at the usage data for e.g. Turkey when they stepped up censorship a few years ago, Tor usage increased a bit, but it was a tiny amount compared to HotSpot Shield (a VPN product). Most users evading censorship in places like China or Turkey are happy to trust the VPN provider in return for superior performance or app compatibility, because they know little VPN providers aren't going to snitch them out.
Yes, normally people have to pay for VPNs whereas Tor is free. I think it'd be great if there was a collaborative network of people who donate their bandwidth to a kind of decentralised VPN (single hop, authenticated, with abuse checks, unlike Tor). But ultimately running these sorts of networks takes effort and time, and most organisations don't have access to the various grants and such that Tor has.
> please suggest what should an open network do about abuse and rather, why should they be the ones doing anything about it
Keep it under control, same as all other networks are expected to do. There are all sorts of networks that range from very closed (e.g. university networks) to very open (e.g. open signup clouds, Google, Microsoft email networks etc). But none of them have a get-out-of-jail-free card, not even the biggest.
Why should they be the ones to do anything about it - because that's how the internet works. If your network spews abuse onto the platform then it's gonna get blocked and blacklisted. If you don't want your users to all be lumped in the same bucket, then you have to do the differentiation yourself.
The linked thread already explains why simple GET requests can be problematic all by themselves.
But the idea that only Tor can be used to fight censorship is a false equivalence. If you look at the usage data for e.g. Turkey when they stepped up censorship a few years ago, Tor usage increased a bit, but it was a tiny amount compared to HotSpot Shield (a VPN product). Most users evading censorship in places like China or Turkey are happy to trust the VPN provider in return for superior performance or app compatibility, because they know little VPN providers aren't going to snitch them out.
Yes, normally people have to pay for VPNs whereas Tor is free. I think it'd be great if there was a collaborative network of people who donate their bandwidth to a kind of decentralised VPN (single hop, authenticated, with abuse checks, unlike Tor). But ultimately running these sorts of networks takes effort and time, and most organisations don't have access to the various grants and such that Tor has.
> please suggest what should an open network do about abuse and rather, why should they be the ones doing anything about it
Keep it under control, same as all other networks are expected to do. There are all sorts of networks that range from very closed (e.g. university networks) to very open (e.g. open signup clouds, Google, Microsoft email networks etc). But none of them have a get-out-of-jail-free card, not even the biggest.
Why should they be the ones to do anything about it - because that's how the internet works. If your network spews abuse onto the platform then it's gonna get blocked and blacklisted. If you don't want your users to all be lumped in the same bucket, then you have to do the differentiation yourself.
The linked thread already explains why simple GET requests can be problematic all by themselves.