Tor takes aim against malicious nodes on the network

The Tor Project is working with Princeton University boffins to try and identify possibly malicious nodes, and prevent them from harvesting traffic by gaming its node reputation system. Tor's reputation services collect flags from relays, from which they assess and publish (hourly) the reputation of relays, but the researchers …

[Mark 85]

Will this detect if any of the 5-Eyes are running entry or exit nodes? This is more of a "I'm curious" question as I've heard rumors about this for quite a long time. The rumors suggest this as TOR was originally funded by the US Government, amongst others.

The nature of this article and other others lately suggests that TOR is less anonymous than anyone really thinks it is.

[Grikath]

They may or they may not. If they're doing it well, you could never tell..

[Rol]

Yep. If someone is interested in you, whether it be the security services or some other nefarious outfit, you can be sure, nothing you do on the net will go unobserved.

Having said that, you would need to be someone of interest to warrant such an invasion, so most of us really only need some reasonable security and a blameless existence....err..how do I turn this off...arrgh..quick quick...

[Ole Juul]

misconceptions

"The nature of this article and other others lately suggests that TOR is less anonymous than anyone really thinks it is."

You nailed something there. Except for the "anyone". Lots of people know the truth about Tor, but unfortunately many people also think only in absolutes and so are unable to grasp the basic ideas of security and anonymity - neither of which are absolutes.

It is true that Tor provides anonymity, it is a tool for that, but it is not true that that anonymity is absolute. Until someone understands the seemingly simple ideas that nothing is 100% and "never say never", they will not understand this software. Tor is simply a tool, and for some things the best available at the moment. Hopefully it will improve with time, and hopefully a lot of people will eventually learn to not trust any software absolutely.

[Anonymous Coward]

and to wrap up (I think), yes it was funded by the federal government. The development work came out of the Naval Research Laboratory and the US State Dept. was one of the drivers for its creation. The idea was to provide sufficient anonymity to protect people living under authoritarian regimes. It's done a pretty good job so far as I can tell, although Project Tor will never be able to say "Enough, it's done" anytime soon.

I'm not at all concerned about whose funding it, just that the people doing the work are trustworthy (as if you can be certain of that!). They are that.

[Oengus]

I will use any tool I can to confound/confuse the enemy (Advertisers, TLAs, etc). If TOR make it harder for them to track me and costs them resources to build a profile on me all the better.

[Pascal Monett]

All you need to confuse advertisers is Firefox with NoScript and an ad blocker. TOR is not indispensable for that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know they can get around the ad blockers by tying it to the actual content or using an ad wall, meaning you MUST enable the ads to get the content itself. And once that happens, the mere request of the ad is enough information for them. They can timestamp the IP and, if necessary, correlate it with ISP records.

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

"meaning you MUST enable the ads to get the content itself"

If I go to a website and it is all blocked I will just assume it is one big advertisement and go elsewhere.

[Charles 9]

And if there's no elsewhere and you NEED the contents?