Swiss Researchers Describe a Faster, More Secure Tor 61
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and University College London published a paper this week describing a faster and more secure version of Tor called HORNET. On one hand, the new onion routing network can purportedly achieve speeds of up to 93 gigabits per second and "be scaled to support large numbers of users with minimal overhead". On the other hand, researchers cannot claim to be immune to "confirmation attacks" known to be implemented on Tor, but they point out that, given how HORNET works, perpetrators of such attacks would have to control significantly more ISPs across multiple geopolitical boundaries and probably sacrifice the secrecy of their operations in order to successfully deploy such attacks on HORNET.
Where have all the Slashdotters gone? (Score:4, Insightful)
As I look upon the Slashdot front page today, I see only one story with more than 100 comments. Most submissions here routinely get only 50, if not much fewer. One submission from yesterday only has 20 comments!
This very submission has been on the front page for over 30 minutes, and there wasn't one single comment when I started writing this one!
To really see what I'm talking about, look at Slashdot as it appeared a decade ago on July 25, 2005 [archive.org]. Or compare it to the nearest Saturday to then, July 23, 2005 [archive.org].
Almost all of those submissions had at least 100 comments. Many of them had far more. In fact, it was routine to see submissions with 400 or even 500 comments. So clearly something is extremely wrong today, when 100 comments is considered a lot.
Dice, we need to have a talk about this existential problem, and how to remedy this situation.
The first thing to do is to stop with the -1 moderations that plague so many discussions here. Too much perfectly fine content ends up at -1 right away. We're pretty sure it's somebody affiliated with Slashdot who is responsible. Even if it isn't, Slashdot should not be giving mod points to whoever is engaging in this harmful moderation.
The second thing to do is to get rid of the posting limits. They made sense when submissions here routinely got hundreds of comments. Now that the numbers of comments is measured using tens, the limits should go. Users should get an unlimited number of comments a day, and the time between comments should be at most one minute. Remember, this is a discussion site. Putting up artificial barriers to discussion, like rate limits, only causes harm!
The third thing to do is to avoid the social justice submissions. Yes, they get lots of comments, but they're extremely low-quality comments. 500 of those comments are worth less than even just 10 good comments about a legitimate topic.
It's not too late to save Slashdot. With some simple and sensible changes, this site could easily be restored to its former glory. Get rid of the bad moderators, get rid of the posting limits, and let us actually converse here! Help restore this site to a place where people actually want to come and visit. Please, Dice, do the right thing!
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I think it is, and I think it's been too late for some time now.
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Roses are red,
grass is greener.
When I read Slashdot,
I play with my weiner.
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Anthony, is that you?
Re:Where have all the Slashdotters gone? (Score:4, Insightful)
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People tend to do things for 2 main reasons.
One is Love. ;)
And one is Money.
Slashdot was based on Love at first. People who were/are passionate about technology and programming/computers read and commented here and everything was mostly fine. Then people who were interested in Money got involved and, well, we all know how that ALWAYS works out. And if you don't know, then you are the assholes we are talking about
We all posted our "FUCK BETA" complaints, but the Money lovers didn't listen because we hurt their little feelings, so Slashdot will die off soon and someone else will take its place. A place where Love of tech overrides the Money hungry mutators.
____
Let it be known that my feelings are more important than your rights. ;|
These are absolutely the pertinent facts/factors. gj
I still use http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 and if it was the dumb ass layout they tried hard to pump, I wouldn't look at this site again. To even keep reading the back-forth of layout bullshit caused me to not read this for a while. I've been reading slashdot for a long long time. I forgot my 5 digit account password and my 6 digit account password. Aside from oh look muh old age, there's no real use for an "account". So fuck it, AC I will be.
You're
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Absolutely agree. I get around to reading slashdot less and less, the comments are less and less interesting on fewer and fewer interesting articles.
I have been on the net since there was a net, have been building Linux kernels since 1999, surely have been reading slashdot since it got started. Even 10 years ago, I would read literally 90% of the articles and at least skim through all the comments.
I also have an ID with a low number, haven't bothered to use it for so long I am not sure it still exists.
You
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All of it, to secure against automatic analysis and profiling.
Re:Where have all the Slashdotters gone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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The problem is not "trolls".
The problem is people like you, who deem others as being "trolls".
The people you label as "trolls" aren't even shit disturbers. They're just normal people who hold a different opinion than you do.
So you push for moderation. You push for censorship. You push for "smaller communities" of people who only share your small set of views. You ridicule the idea of free expression.
Slashdot was once an open community where disagreement was considered a good thing. Contradicting viewpoints
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Really? So you think all the untreated sewage on places like the *chans, Reddit, Stormfront, etc etc etc is perfectly OK?
Really? YOu're going to put those three in the same category? That really demonstrates the point the other anon was making.
You think all the hate speech, racism, sexism, radicalization, outright illegal shit, attention-whoring, and pointless negative bullshit that is rampant on the Internet in general, is perfectly OK?
Yeah, that all comes with the "free speech" territory. I have no pr
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" The people you find trollish and without legit value are tomorrow's venerable cultural leaders, so get over yourself."
We are truly 100% fucked if this occurs. These venerable future leaders would make ISIS look like a benevolent organization that is spreads love and sunshine to the masses. We already have to put up with the entitlement generation who substitute real education with "echo chamber forums". A generation who obtains English or Political science degrees and wonder why they cannot get a job. Whe
Mod parent down (Score:2)
In his post higher up in this thread, he reveals an elitist attitude:
I'd almost wish it would go back to being accessible only by Universities, the government, and the military.
This, as well as hi anti-freedom of speech commentary, is in line with the statis
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September 1993.
Never forget.
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Wow, I remember seeing this exact same comment on Usenet in 1995.
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I think you'll find most of the techies got fed up with the perpetual SJW shill stories claiming they're EVIL SEXIST RACIST CISWHITEMALES... and left. SJWs destroy everything they touch, and don't even care, because they didn't build that.
Personally, I only bother coming back here when I need an excuse to procrastinate. And I did have a four or five digit UID before I forgot the login and had to create a new one.
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Soylentnews.org is getting better at the same rate as Slashdot.org is getting worse.
Unfortunately, some of the a-holes* from slashdot have also found soylent, but in general, the discussions are much better on soylent.
* e.g., the racist, sexist trolls living in their mom's basements.
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So, how does this malicious script get executed and achieve root in the first place, without user action and the user providing the root password?
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The AC trolls didn't help. ;-)
On topic, so long as tor makes it harder for the NSA to figure out who is who on Tor by monopolizing the nodes I think Tor will be just fine. Greater speed is great. But the point of tor is security and that is somewhat tarnished at this point.
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As I look upon the Slashdot front page today, I see only one story with more than 100 comments. Most submissions here routinely get only 50, if not much fewer. One submission from yesterday only has 20 comments!
This very submission has been on the front page for over 30 minutes, and there wasn't one single comment when I started writing this one!
To really see what I'm talking about, look at Slashdot as it appeared a decade ago on July 25, 2005 [archive.org]. Or compare it to the nearest Saturday to then, July 23, 2005 [archive.org].
Almost all of those submissions had at least 100 comments. Many of them had far more. In fact, it was routine to see submissions with 400 or even 500 comments. So clearly something is extremely wrong today, when 100 comments is considered a lot.
Dice, we need to have a talk about this existential problem, and how to remedy this situation.
The first thing to do is to stop with the -1 moderations that plague so many discussions here. Too much perfectly fine content ends up at -1 right away. We're pretty sure it's somebody affiliated with Slashdot who is responsible. Even if it isn't, Slashdot should not be giving mod points to whoever is engaging in this harmful moderation.
The second thing to do is to get rid of the posting limits. They made sense when submissions here routinely got hundreds of comments. Now that the numbers of comments is measured using tens, the limits should go. Users should get an unlimited number of comments a day, and the time between comments should be at most one minute. Remember, this is a discussion site. Putting up artificial barriers to discussion, like rate limits, only causes harm!
The third thing to do is to avoid the social justice submissions. Yes, they get lots of comments, but they're extremely low-quality comments. 500 of those comments are worth less than even just 10 good comments about a legitimate topic.
It's not too late to save Slashdot. With some simple and sensible changes, this site could easily be restored to its former glory. Get rid of the bad moderators, get rid of the posting limits, and let us actually converse here! Help restore this site to a place where people actually want to come and visit. Please, Dice, do the right thing!
This. OMG this. There's a lot of truth here... Dice's handling of Slashdot is slowly killing it... :(
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It's always quieter online mid-summer in the northern hemisphere.
I've run a website for several year now and June/July is our quietest time for sales.
Believe it or not "Nerds" do take a break in the outside warm summer air.... ;)
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Go outside and get some sunshine and fresh air. Sounds like you really need it...
No, that's not the reason. The GP explained away that bullshit excuse of yours. Go read the motherfucking comment and look at what it linked to. Here's the relevant part for you:
The evidence shows very clearly that it was not quieter during the summer 10 years ago, even on a Saturday. As is so plainly obvious, there were many more comments then than there are now.
It's not about it being summer. It's not about it being Saturday. It's about stupid policies having ruined Slashdot!
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Slashdot is dying. Netcraft confirms it.
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My observation is that the number of posts has gone down but, and this is hardly objective, the percentage of "quality" posts in the "good threads" are the same as they have always been. I suppose I do not help. I simply refuse to moderate most of the time. I see no value in it. Another consideration is that there are vast number of discussion sites online now as compared to then. The world, and how we interact with it, has changed.
hell yeah freedom (Score:1)
Hor net (Score:3, Funny)
You know what would complete TOR/Hornet? (Score:1)
If it came bundled with a privacy enhanced web browser that would limit logins (no Gmail, FB, Twitter or any of the usual providers), remove ads and JavaScript tracking and not keep browsing logs. It should be hard to make a mistake and accidentally reveal who you are by accessing an account. Also, a list of keywords should be checked against all outgoing data, acting like a firewall, to prevent it from being leaked - like, if the outgoing packet contains my name, email or other sensitive data then I don't
HORNET vs Tor (Score:2)
the new onion routing network can purportedly achieve speeds of up to 93 gigabits per second and "be scaled to support large numbers of users with minimal overhead".
As someone who ran a Tor exit node for years (and has the bright green t-shirt to prove it), I don't think the protocol has anything to do with the speeds of Tor. Not inherently, anyway. Tor is slow because the vast majority of its nodes run on asymmetric consumer links. If we all had symmetric gigabit Google fiber, it would behave substantially differently. Perhaps they've adjusted the protocol, but no amount of tweaking can get around physical reality. The bandwidth simply isn't available in the netw
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As someone who ran a Tor exit node for years, I'm surprised you're not wearing a bright orange t-shirt to prove it.
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As someone who ran a Tor exit node for years, I'm surprised you're not wearing a bright orange t-shirt to prove it.
Time passed me by. I stayed on Debian potato for most of a decade, and the Tor client was no longer compatible.
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As someone who ran a Tor exit node for years (and has the bright green t-shirt to prove it), I don't think the protocol has anything to do with the speeds of Tor. Not inherently, anyway. Tor is slow because the vast majority of its nodes run on asymmetric consumer links.
The Tor protocol *is* the problem.
Tor says "I will use one encrypted channel, and send your data out that one channel, regardless of its speed".
Not "I will borrow from IP. I will open many encrypted channels, and send packets of data out each channel. The end node will re-assemble data from those channels. We will use the IP protocol to retransmit lost packets over each channel.".
IP, even though it is physically 1 channel, pretends to be 8 channels that each can transmit one packet. Something very similar t
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I know nothing about the TOR protocol, but could you use a random number of hops drawn from a modified Poisson distribution in which the user can modify the minimum number of hops? Every time a layer is peeled off, the node would essentially check that this isn't the last hop, and behave accordingly.
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Not "I will borrow from IP. I will open many encrypted channels, and send packets of data out each channel. The end node will re-assemble data from those channels. We will use the IP protocol to retransmit lost packets over each channel.".
It doesn't work that way. Most of what runs over Tor is TCP. TCP mandates frame arrival order within a TCP connection. Most of the TCP services being used through Tor (prominently, HTTP), do not allow establishing multiple connections to retrieve any single component of a page. Combine the two and you're stuck with a single stream of data running through the Tor network, and you can't shift the stream between nodes in a single session without doing a whole LOT of work to maintain packet order. It's bee
... and it's called I2P. (Score:2, Interesting)
Bandwidth (Score:1)
"93 gigabits per second" sounds nice, but we must of course keep in mind the classic question of "compared to what?". This particular number is on a 120 Gb/s local network, which is nice, but not exactly the standard use case for onion routing.
The paper shows some detailed figures comparing performance to Tor in various settings over a 10 Gb/s link. Hornet is much better than Tor on very small payloads (less than 1KB). In the other comparisons, it's usually slightly better, but its goodput is actually worse
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It's legal (Score:2)