Tor - The Yin or the Yang?

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running a interesting article on Tor, The Onion Router project sponsored by the EFF. Tor aims to offer anonymous internet use. Once sponsored by the Naval Research Lab with support from DARPA, it is now managed by The Free Haven Project. Although Tor claims to improve safety and security, the article goes into detail on how Tor can be used as a anonymous attack platform."

Solves problems here and abroad

[powerline22]

I live in the USA, and I use it all the time at my high school. Why? My high school thinks it prudent to block many sites such as hackaday.com and coxandorkum.com. I also used it when I was in china to bypass the great firewall to check my evil capitalist college email.

I think that if anyone is being blocked from visitng any site, anywhere, they should use this to show how stupid and ineffective filters are, especially in schools. Why bother to educate responsibility on the internet when you can force it on kids!

Re:the need

[An Onerous Coward]

Complete accountability is wonderful in theory, but problematic in practice. First, even theoretically, it can only work if everyone is held accountable. If you're accountable to the police, but the police are not accountable to the people they serve, then anonymity might be required in order to report corruption and whatnot.

Now let's move on to practice. Say you want to do something pretty much harmless, but frowned upon by society at large, like lighting up a joint, having sex with your girlfriend, or killing a hobo with a ball-peen hammer. If society bans certain acts arbitrarily and irrationally, then you shouldn't have to be "accountable" to that sort of insanity.