[Freedombox-discuss] Leaving the (proprietary) cloud - my roadmap for FB

[Jon Spriggs]

2010/10/9 Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson <bre at beanstalks-project.net>:
> On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 4:47 PM, Jonas Smedegaard <dr at jones.dk> wrote:
>> Could you please elaborate in *words* on what it is you are talking about?
>>
>> I failed to resolve above (is it a TOR URL?), and anyway I find it
>> generally annoying to need to jump through hoops instead of simply be given
>> a clear brief explanation :-(
>
> Yes, that is an URL within TOR.
>
> As I understand it (and I speak as someone who hasn't yet played with TOR),
> you can provide a service to the TOR community where anonymity of both the
> users and the service providers is guaranteed. The address for such a
> service is a .onion URL like those above.

The TOR client application contains a configurable section to provide
access to services running on the local network to the client
application.

> I'm not sure what the benefit is, of providing a TOR hidden service version
> of something which is freely and non-anonymously available on the public
> Internet, as I think TOR provides access to the open Internet as well.

A hidden service exposes no clear-text traffic over the internet. The
traffic is encrypted from the entry point (usually a client
application running on the local machine) to the client application at
the remote end. This application will usually (but is not required to)
be running on the same machine where the service is located.

If you want a secure way to submit documents (like Wikileaks), but
want to be able to offer the data publicly, then this would be where
it's a good idea to offer both routes in. In this case, if you wanted
to search for information about a medical condition, but didn't want
to have it publicly known that you were interested in that condition
(if it were taboo for example), then this would be why you'd search
using a TOR hidden service.

> Maybe
> it makes things more efficient? Or maybe it's just good geek-PR for
> DuckDuckGo. :-)

It's the second option as well :)

All the best,
--
Jon "The Nice Guy" Spriggs