Re: OSI 1-3 attack on Tor? in it.wikipedia

[Paul Syverson <syverson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 10:54:57AM -0800, Seth David Schoen wrote:
> Paul Syverson writes:
> 
> > Err no. That's exactly wrong. It is in fact "The Onion Routing".
> 
> Your explanation makes sense, and you're certainly in a much better
> position than I to know the history of the project's name.  On the
> other hand, there are many references that seem to call it "The
> Onion Router", including Wikipedia and the Tor wiki:
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_(anonymity_network)
> https://wiki.torproject.org/noreply/TheOnionRouter/
> 

Yeah well I respond to stuff if I see it in a message and (more
significantly) have a moment. Life's much too short for me to delve
into wikipedia because I don't think it has something right.

> > "The Onion Router" would make no sense in any case. It would
> > imply that there was one amongst the c. 2K onion routers currently out
> > there carrying traffic that is the genuine article.
> 
> I think it makes sense to call the _software_ "the onion router" and
> any individual node "an onion router" (akin to "the Apache web server"
> and "an Apache web server", "the Squid proxy" and "a Squid proxy").
> 

Fair enough. Although it still doesn't seem right with me.

What is that web server running on? The Apache web server.
What are you proxying through? The squid proxy.

Notice that `server' and `proxy' are part of the question.  Perhaps if
people asked questions like, "Which anonymity router is on that node?"
and there were onion routers and crowds routers or freedom routers or
something I could hear "The Onion Router" without cringing. But so far
that seems unlikely. 'Tor' is a nice because it is ambiguous between
software, network, project, 501(c)3, etc. not to mention its parsing.
(I like the recursive reading of it best.) And don't get me started on
regretting going along with the title of the Tor design paper,
multiple things wrong with that title. ;>)

aloha,
Paul