VP5

[Kaylee]

I use the onion for doing anything sensitive and the rest of the time I am all out there for anyone to read. Nothing to see here just stories of farting cats. Be the Grey Man, not the one that looks like they have something to hide or the one without a history.

+1 bolding added by me

Scott nailed it.

Tor/onion is nifty in theory, but in practice it puts a big bull's eye on you.

Tor was not designed for security, and most of its non-criminal users do not understand that.
Its goal was privacy, however it has a huge fundamental flaw in that it relies on a relatively small number of published exit nodes.

Any site you surf to, knows when you're using Tor.
The overwhelming majority of Tor users are criminals, which gives visited sites an incentive to treat Tor visitors differently. I've considered blocking them out right, however the sites I defend are generally sufficiently well locked down, and criminal Tor traffic is so light, that I haven't bothered.
Last week, I did block a big portion of Ukraine, because those bots were hammering me (in one case, 30x normal traffic).

Anybody can set up a Tor exit node.
Think about the implications of that.
There have been well documented cases of benign researchers setting up node(s) and watching traffic.
Imagine if "state actors" or other "bad guys" ran some.
We must assume they have and will continue to do so.

If you web search:

Tor exit nodes

You'll find much discussion of this, by credible experts.

A lot of the misunderstanding is based on the awesome Cory Doctorow's writings, in particular his novel Little Brother:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Bro...row_novel)
Cory is a writer, not an engineer, so his view of Tor is highly optimistic and based on theory not reality.
It's an excellent book, and a good primer on Tor, despite that.
If there were orders of magnitude more of both nodes and users, then it could potentially be "safer", privacy-wise.


Earlier today, I caught a great interview with Cory Doctorow on CSPAN2's In Depth (yes, I am a Nerd).
Despite my concerns above, he is an awesome person, and the interview is well worth watching.
It's repeated tonight (11pm Central) and Saturday Aug 11. I suspect but don't know if it's available online.