Re: beneficia versus maleficia

2010-10-02 Thread Andrew Lewman 
On Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:58:15 -0500
David Bennett  wrote:

> I am facing a moral dilemma in regards to joining the tor proxy
> network.  I am hoping a discussion may alleviate some of my concerns.

It seems what you are wrestling with is the dual use nature of
any technology.  

Some easy examples are: highways are used to transport pregnant mothers
to hospitals to deliver cuddly babies and to transport kidnappers and
their victims across the country.  The phone system is used to let you
keep in touch with your friends and family and to stalk and harass
domestic violence victims.  Firewalls are used by companies to keep
their employees protected by outside threats and used by governments to
repress their citizenry.

From my work with victims of domestic violence, abusers and survivors
use technology in surprising ways.  From cooking pots to butter knives
to pre-paid anonymous cellphones, I've seen the technologies used to
abuse and used to help.  

It comes down to if you believe the good uses outweigh the bad uses.
Technologies are generally introduced with a narrow use case in mind.
Seldom to these technologies stick to their original use case over time.

We have real situations in which tor is used at
https://www.torproject.org/torusers.  For every bad thing some jerk
does over tor, there are likely 50-100 more using tor for good reasons.

Think about all of the bandwidth tor relays push and how many of the
connections result in complaints or abuse.  The bad uses are more
public but still the vast minority.

In the end, tor is a technology.  It can be used for both good and
bad.  We develop, advocate, and continue to work on tor for the
positive outcomes; whatever that may mean for your morals and locale.

-- 
Andrew
pgp 0x31B0974B
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Corrupt state file?

2010-10-02 Thread Geoff Down 
Hi,
just installed Tor 0.2.2.15-alpha (git-eba3f37f17a2af4f) PPC, got the
following
'Oct 02 22:11:19.841 [warn] Corrupt state file? Build times count
mismatch. Read 29 times, but file says 1900544
Oct 02 22:11:19.850 [warn] or_state_save_broken(): Bug: Unable to parse
state in "[tor data dir]/state". Moving it aside to "[tor data
dir]/state.0".  This could be a bug in Tor; please tell the developers.'
 Client function seems to be fine, and it looks like relay connections
 are being made.
I did a quick search of the archives, apologies if this has come up
before.

GD

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Re: beneficia versus maleficia

2010-10-02 Thread Robert Ransom 
On Sat, 02 Oct 2010 15:58:15 -0500
David Bennett  wrote:

> I am facing a moral dilemma in regards to joining the tor proxy
> network.  I am hoping a discussion may alleviate some of my concerns.
> 
> On the pro side we have a group of individuals whose intentions for
> using the technology are consistent with common values.  These include
> uses such as researching medical conditions and accessing/providing
> knowledge forbidden by an authoritarian presence.  On the con side, the
> technology can be used for diabolical purposes such as predatory and
> violent behavior (for example; pedophilia and bomb making).
> 
> The technical challenges of discriminating between these uses are
> elusive at best.  One facebook session may be noble while another may be
> predaceous.  Although risk associated with enabling an individual to
> overcome obstacles in the quest for knowledge is acceptable to me, the
> thought of enabling a devious mind to harm other individuals is hard to
> swallow.

People who are already willing to commit crimes can already get
anonymity -- they can use unsecured wireless access points, they can
break into poorly secured computers on the Internet and relay their
traffic through those, they can steal phones to make anonymous phone
calls, they can send letters through the U.S. Postal Service
anonymously, etc..  Tor is for people who do not want to break the law
in order to keep advertisers
()
and evil governments
(,
, etc.) from
tracking what they read on the Internet.


> I'd like to hear other thoughts and comments about this.

Read .


Robert Ransom


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Re: Torbutton 1.3.0-alpha: Community Edition!

2010-10-02 Thread Robert Ransom 
On Sat, 02 Oct 2010 14:59:42 -0500
David Bennett  wrote:

> I haven't tried the new version yet,  is there a descriptive popup that
> explains what's happening when a user clicks a tor:// or tors:// ?

Yes.


Robert Ransom


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beneficia versus maleficia

2010-10-02 Thread David Bennett 
I am facing a moral dilemma in regards to joining the tor proxy
network.  I am hoping a discussion may alleviate some of my concerns.

On the pro side we have a group of individuals whose intentions for
using the technology are consistent with common values.  These include
uses such as researching medical conditions and accessing/providing
knowledge forbidden by an authoritarian presence.  On the con side, the
technology can be used for diabolical purposes such as predatory and
violent behavior (for example; pedophilia and bomb making).

The technical challenges of discriminating between these uses are
elusive at best.  One facebook session may be noble while another may be
predaceous.  Although risk associated with enabling an individual to
overcome obstacles in the quest for knowledge is acceptable to me, the
thought of enabling a devious mind to harm other individuals is hard to
swallow.

I'd like to hear other thoughts and comments about this.

--Dave

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Re: Torbutton 1.3.0-alpha: Community Edition!

2010-10-02 Thread David Bennett 
On 10/01/2010 08:51 PM, Mike Perry wrote:
> Intuition also tells me that tor:// and tors:// urls will be easier to
> use, understand, and remember by the general public.. Can you give
> some examples/reasons why just using these schemes actually prevents
> us from doing this scheme layering idea for other protocols in the
> future (when it is supported)? In otherwords, why can't we just do both?
>
>   

There is no reason why not.  As long as there are no obvious risks with
a  user clicking on a public tor:// URL and initiating the proxy layer. 
My understanding of the implementation is that all traffic occurring in
the host browser after a tor:// request is initiated would be re-routed
unless the 'tor' schema handler launched a separate host browser.   This
may not be the intention of the user and may conflict with accessing IP
whitelisted services (FTP hosts, etc...)

I haven't tried the new version yet,  is there a descriptive popup that
explains what's happening when a user clicks a tor:// or tors:// ?

--Dave

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