this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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I don't think I really have a reason to use it.
The reason is privacy, everybody has a reason to use it.
In theory yes, but practically speaking trying to access a lot of the modern web over TOR would be at best painfully slow and at worst almost impossible thanks to DDoS protection providers like cloudflare.
This right here. A very large part of the web is inaccessible from TOR. Last I tried you couldn't access social media, Google constantly forces you through captchas because it thinks you're a bot, and anything on a CDN will either forces captchas or just doesn't work. Financial institutions absolutely are all inaccessible.
Privacy is important, but most of the places you want to go with TOR to stay private won't let you in because malicious actors want to use it for the same reasons.
Facebook has an official.onion domain and it's the only way I access it, as it's required for my employer.
Reddit also has a .onion as well. Funny considering their pride on Ban evasion detection they should outright block Tor.
While I agree with you, I'm wondering what the benefit is of watching youtube and posting/reading lemmy/mastodon through a tor network. Because those are the main things I do. While I do understand that in some countries and also in public wifi networks the chances of traffic being intercepted and man in the middle attacks are higher, I do not expect that to happen to my fibre connection in my western country.
Unless you browse Geocities sites from 1998, intercepting and MITMing is simply not an issue. Everything built nowadays uses https, which fully protects you against those.
Yeah people when they discuss Neworking and VPNs I've noticed are either illiterate to the existence of https or are deliberately not mentioning it for the purpose of misleading people in some way (in the case of VPN sponsorships it's to get people to buy them).
then try reading the article
I'd rather not waste my time reading an article about a program I'm not currently using to find out if I should use it our not. I'd rather see a post that has bulletpoints with pre's and cons. My time is limited enough as it is.
[edit] I realise that my comment will probably come across as unfriendly so I will add some explaining to it.
I am currently in a western country using a fibre landline and I trust my internet provider to not intercept my data or use things like a man in the middle attack. Am I right for assuming that and if so, would tor prevent that? Will tor slow down my internet? I mostly watch youtube videos and read/post on lemmy/mastodon. I am not against using tor at all, but my energy and time are limited so I don't feel like reading a whole article just for an app I do not feel the need to use. I am currently very happy with my firefox browser and all the add-ons I use. And with all the modifications I have put into it to make it work just the way I like. Would I loose all that by switching to tor? I am prepared to change to tor but I am not in the camp of "protect privacy at all costs, even if it greatly inconveniences me". Especially if the risks of not using tor seem quite low in my situation.
okay. perhaps instead of wasting your time writing an entire paragraph, you should read the article and you'll find out that that entire paragraph was irrelevant
it's actually not an article about the pros and cons of tor. it could not be summed up in bullet points about the pros and cons of tor
i'll admit to being a little facetious before, but i implore you to read articles before commenting on them
Thing is... if I have to do that for every time someone linkdrops an article, I'll have no time left in my day.
And it seems I was right that I have no real reason to use tor.
if you spent less time writing comments about articles you haven't read, you might have more time. do you do this in other walks of life? wander into restaurants you've never eaten at and announce "i don't think there's really any reason to order the fish"?
okay, i'll sum the article up for you. the more people that use tor, the more it protects vulnerable people. journalists writing exposés about corrupt governments, refugees trying to flee, etc. the more normal people using tor, the more they get lost in the crowd. it's nothing to do with whether you have any reason to use tor, that's irrelevant. by using it, you're helping those in vulnerable positions. happy? now go write something inciteful
well yes, actually. i have time to sit down over breakfast, read a few articles, maybe reply to a few comments
you clearly live such a busy lifestyle you haven't time to read an article before making an asinine comment
well that's a pretty fuckin stupid viewpoint in my opinion. "i'm not going to help protect the careers and possibly lives of people in authoritarian countries, because i'd have to install a programme and possibly even launch it a couple of times per month". running folding@home did me no advantage, i still did it.
don't worry, i won't be. i was being flippant because i thought you an idiot, but it turns out you're willfully ignorant.
I am seeing this black and white thinking a lot. Just because I don't do the thing you want me to do, I am supposedly "fuckin stupid". Very mature bud, very mature.
I find this discussion to be quite interesting because it seems like you cannot handle people disagreeing with you very well. Maybe this is a returning thing in your life and if it is, I advise you to get help. It's not normal to respond in the way you are responding to a simple disagreement. All the best with that.
Hey folks, I think this thread is getting a bit heated and it is probably time for all involved to disengage.