Re: [tor-talk] Tor as ecommerce platform

[Maxim Kammerer <mk@xxxxxx>]

On Fri, Aug 10, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Andrew Lewman <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The Tor users page is based on a number of people who have told us how
> they use Tor. They didn't want to be named, so the profiles are
> anonymous and aggregated.

Sure, that's why the “Tor users” page is more or less a rewritten and
expanded version of the original overview on Free Heaven [1], which is
a simple promotional writeup about people being able to circumvent
firewalls and hide their IPs, with the lone exception of something
that looks like an NRL-initiated internal military case study. Did you
write that page?

> However, since you want named users willing to put themselves at risk,
> here they are https://people.torproject.org/~andrew/tor-user-stories/

I don't want named users — I would be completely fine with anonymous
accounts. Anyway, I went over the stories in that directory (with the
exception of the PDF, which is inaccessible, and the source of that
PDF, linked from the Tor blog, is inaccessible as well), and they are
all about either (1) (mostly) activists circumventing a filter, or (2)
(rarely) activists hiding one's IP. Boring, especially considering
that most activists greatly overestimate their importance or attention
from authorities. Nothing about hidden services or intelligence
gathering, nothing about commercial espionage, not even about
anonymous blogging (not surprising — I am yet to see a popular blogger
who is not an attention whore).

Interestingly, there are a couple of non-trivial entries on “Tor
users” page, like the US IBB entry — that's right there US foreign
intelligence supporting Tor usage by subversive elements in countries
of interest. I didn't spend too much time searching for that — did
they fund Tor? I think you should expand on this on the page, since it
shows some technical credibility.

By the way, those stories suggest that no one actually needs anything
beyond the most basic anonymity set reduction — it's just an
attractive R&D topic because you can make small incremental
improvements.

> I ask again, because I want the answer to improve us:
>> > How would you have us promote Tor?

Well, it's not really my job, but I think that you should focus less
on propaganda, and focus more on getting users involved who will then
expand the network instead of just using it as a proxy. Make everyone
a relay (even if low-bandwidth relays are not useful, and even if
there are theoretical issues — solve the issues instead) and have a
hidden service address by default. Work with file sharing software
developers to have a one-click setup of P2P sharing via Tor. Make an
easy interface for publishing files or simple sites on user's .onion
host. Don't invent use cases, because users have their own (which you
don't like and hence ignore) — facilitate network expansion which will
actually bring in new use cases.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20051110053619/http://tor.freehaven.net/overview.html

-- 
Maxim Kammerer
Liberté Linux: http://dee.su/liberte
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