What you always wanted to know about TOR but were afraid to ask

[GreyGeek]

[#]P2P[/#]
[#]TOR[/#]

[oldgeek]

Interesting video. I was interested in TOR a couple of years ago, and even flirted with entering the 'Dark Web' out of curiosity, but in the end decided to let the whole thing go and concentrate on gentler pursuits.

[GreyGeek]

Interesting video. I was interested in TOR a couple of years ago, and even flirted with entering the 'Dark Web' out of curiosity, but in the end decided to let the whole thing go and concentrate on gentler pursuits.

A wise move, IMO. From what I've read the FBI and other LEOs have honey pots all over the onion web.

I set up a guest OS and installed TOR. I also did some research on the TOR, the darkweb, their history and problems. TOR was funded by the CIA, the guys who forgot who they were supposed to be spying on, and for whom. It's fast enough on my fast machine, but on typical boxes it is too slow for heavy graphics pages or movies, although it would be fast enough for threaded political groups, but it is not as secure as people think. I also checked out IPFS and NetZero, P2P networks with encrypted blocks, like what BitCoin uses. The big weakness: it's not really P2P when you have to connect through your ISP servers which are, no doubt, compromised. Real P2P using wifi router and extensions, high gain antennas, etc..., is still slow and very limited. One on the edge of Pittsburgh has been trying to build a web base for FIVE YEARS and so far still has only 50 members in their network. Several of the nodes connect to the web for content, so the whole idea is wasted once you have the web connected. Besides, because they use WIFI their signal can be easily intercepted. How easily it can be broken into by LEOs is speculation, but I suspect with NSA tools it would, has been, rather easy.

The "onion" extension was created by the TOR team but you'll notice that hosting services don't include *.onion as a valid extension. Ordinary browsers can't surf the web because most ISPs, if not all, send onion requests to their 404 server.

http://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/tec...g/what-is-tor/

The Surface Web is any website or page that can be indexed and easily searched by search engines like Google. The Deep Web is anything on the internet that cannot be indexed and searched directly by a public search engine. Examples of these are government or educational websites which have their own internal search capabilities to look for their specific data.

The Dark Web is that part of Deep Web that really doesn’t want to be found by regular browsers. Drugs, weapons, malware and human trafficking are all traded on the Dark Web.

It's technically anything that requires more than just a web browser to access. The Dark Web is not a single entity, but many ‘Dark Webs’ that are each generally independent of one another.” Tor is simply the largest of these entities.

IF one really wanted to communicate to someone in total secrecy then digitizing the message, encrypting it into a square matrix with a one time key pad, and sending it via UHF in a high speed burst on a randomly selected frequency (previously agreed to) and at a previously agreed specific time (ala CIA) is how to do it. The sent message contains the new freq, time and keypad for the next transmission. Real clock and dagger stuff.

Having free access to your Internet secrets, IF the authorities want to access the encrypted data on your drive it will be real easy. Being "secure in your papers" isn't a right any more. They'll just toss you in jail until you surrender the password. Claiming you forgot has worked only once, and you can bet the LEOs won't use that judge again. Just search using "judge jails man till he reveals password" and read the grim news. The 4th Amendment is as dead as the 1st, 2nd, 5th, 8th and most of the rest. Besides, with all the surveillance of the Internet, and ISPs and Vendors working hand in hand with the LEOs regardless of your Constitutional Rights, the LEOs already have access to all your legal and financial documents. You have no secrets from them. All you keep out are Joe and Sally Sixpack, and they probably don't know how to invade your system anyway. So, I just use a firewall and password and I don't encrypted anything. I would keep no secrets on my computer or iPhone.

[SpecialEd]

>>>>>>>>

IF one really wanted to communicate to someone in total secrecy then digitizing the message, encrypting it into a square matrix with a one time key pad, and sending it via UHF in a high speed burst on a randomly selected frequency (previously agreed to) and at a previously agreed specific time (ala CIA) is how to do it. The sent message contains the new freq, time and keypad for the next transmission. Real clock and dagger stuff.>>>>>>

If you just want to keep the message secret, a properly used OTP is all that is necessary. If you want to hide the fact that you are sending a message and to whom you are sending it, you could make use of one of the Numbers Relay pages. Especially if you use a live USB at a public hotspot.

[GreyGeek]

Those kinds of pages remind me of my amature radio days when I'd listen to shortwave radio stations that broadcast sequences of equal length numbers for a period of time and then go back to music or tones or other means to identify the station. That was in the 1960s when the cold war was hot. Sometimes wideband jamming would take place, blocking the signals. Here is an interesting video on the topic: