On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 04:01:43PM -0400, Ted Smith wrote: > > I couldn't figure > > out why the author, Kurt Knutson of WGN TV, was so taken in by something > > that > > isn't even available yet and about which there is so little publicly > > available > > information. > > > Maybe Tor Project should talk to his publicist ;-)
Tor certainly takes a different approach to publicity compared to people like Haystack. We prefer to let our technology and deployment do the speaking, and then explain it to people once it's clear there's something worth explaining. As has been made clear in all areas of technology over the past years, though, the publicity side of things doesn't care whether you have the technology sorted out or not. Still, no thanks. I'd rather spend my time figuring out how to make the technology actually work, than telling people about how great it'll be. That said, massive publicity engines like this one can still do the field some good. First, it reminds a much broader segment of society about the issues. Second, it draws the attention of the censors. :) > > >looks like they'll be running single-hop proxies from various hosts, and > > >distributing that list inside the proprietary software they distribute > > > > That's more than I managed to extract from it, but that certainly > > looks very bad if that is indeed what they are doing. > > > They're just trying to tunnel traffic out of the "oppressive" countries, > not provide actual anonymity (though they're very unclear about > admitting this and should probably say it in big flashing red letters). > They admit that tunneling Tor through their system would be a "good" > thing. Big red warning letters are actually something that these other projects attack us about. After all, if you scare your users, they'll just go elsewhere, or "worse", they'll stop trying to circumvent their firewall as much. It does worry me that so many of these projects see circumvention and user privacy as totally unrelated goals. Iran sure has been learning its lesson in that regard, with all the shiny new deep packet inspection hardware their government is deploying. Check out these quotes from Iran's chief of police: http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE61800J20100209 For more reading, check out #5 at https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/articles/circumvention-features.html It sure would be cool if somebody worked on pluggable ways to transport Tor traffic in a more unobservable way. I suspect that starting over is an unlikely route to get there though. --Roger *********************************************************************** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/