On 11/9/05, *George W. Maschke* <maschke@xxxxxxxxx
<mailto:maschke@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:
How is the anonymity provided by Tor any more subject to abuse than,
say, the anonymity afforded by companies and institutions that offer
WiFi hotspots? Or Internet cafes? Or public libraries?
Well, Tor is more accessible to more people. Tor lets you use your
own software, not whatever happens to be loaded on the public computer
(answer to 2 and 3 anyway). And the difficulty of tracking people
using Tor is much higher than tracking people using these other
providers, because at least the other providers give you a location.
Along those same lines, the examples you give are more limited. You
could easily set up a bot to use all Tor nodes at once. It'd be a lot
harder to do that with all wifi hotspots, or internet cafes, or public
libraries.
On top of all that, there are probably protections put in place at
most of these places. Firewalls and proxies, with every access being
logged in case there's a problem. And finally, to the degree that
these methods don't provide this type of accountability, they probably
do find themselves being threatened with lawsuits.
I agree with cyphrpunk for the most part. In the end Tor is going to
be widely accepted to the extent that the good outweighs the harm. To
say it's just like cyber cafes, or wifi hotspots, or public libraries,
or selling hammers - none of these are very good analogies. Of course
hooking up a gun to the internet isn't any better, but somewhere
between the two lies my view of the situation. (Actually, both the
hammer and the gun analogy miss the point that Tor just allows you to
do something most users can already do, more anonymously.)
Anthony