Re: [tor-talk] Tor as ecommerce platform

[Maxim Kammerer <mk@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 10:01 PM, Mike Perry <mikeperry@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> For example, in terms of number of users, I'd wager a top current
> demographic is "Paranoid Schizophrenic". If it's not #1, it's gotta be
> top 5. The more general category "Antisocial tendencies" is probably
> another top 5. "People who secretly view fully legal porn" is almost
> certainly up there, perhaps vying with the schizophrenics for the #1
> position.

It's actually not far from what I estimated at the time, except that
the top is probably completely mundane firewall circumvention. [1]

> The Tor users page is in my mind a reflection of what our demographics
> will look like as we improve our technology enough to be useful for
> everyone who wants Internet privacy. We leave out the antisocial
> creeps/weirdos/crazies because they are not our target userbase, and
> their relative dominance right now is merely a reflection of our
> relatively early development status.

The problem is that such selective focus detracts from the project's
credibility. Most Tor users, although they might not understand the
technical issues, are not stupid. They will browse .onion sites, and
see that the most active ones are related to drugs and pedophilia.
They will try to run an exit node, and see the abuse (and perhaps feel
the abuse when they are raided by LE). They will see that many sites
block Tor IPs, and understand that Tor is often used for uploading
questionable content.

Americans probably quickly adapt to that discrepancy, saying: ok, I
see — the “users” page is actually what they want, and talking about
the actual situation is politically incorrect; this is just like
photoshopping black guys into pictures [2]. But most international
users will be genuinely surprised. And it's not like it is that
difficult to be honest: these are the people who we develop Tor for,
these are the users who provide traffic cover, these are the current
users, this is the reason for the early adopters composition, this is
how we expect the userbase to shift through the following years, etc.

> In fact, the paper you linked even has an "Illegal/Questionable"
> category, and guess what, it's #42 at 0.15% of the traffic:
> http://planete.inrialpes.fr/papers/TorTraffic-NSS10.pdf

That Table II is actually very interesting, and is the main reason
that I linked that paper (it's not on AnonBib, by the way). All the
entries in that table, except for the last two (“Illegal/Questionable”
and “IllegalDrugs”) are either non-existent or almost non-existent in
.onion-land (at least wrt. site activity). The last two entries,
however, are very well-represented. So if there was a way to get
.onion access statistics, then I would expect to find those two
categories (CP and drugs) completely overtaking everything else.

> I don't know what you're looking for, but perhaps your own desire for
> everyone to use Tor for "illegal and questionable" stuff is biasing what
> *you* find?

Actually, I just don't like propaganda. I am sure that no one would
make up all those make-believe descriptions of Tor users if Tor was
still a technical project, and wasn't being promoted by various policy
people (i.e., EFF, etc.).

[1] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-April/023837.html
[2] http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/09/02/doctoring-diversity-race-and-photoshop/

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
_______________________________________________
tor-talk mailing list
tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk