Paid performance-tor option?

macintoshzoom macintoshzoom at lavabit.com
Mon Aug 18 18:44:44 UTC 2008


Hi Michael Holstein,

Thank you for your post.

Michael Holstein wrote:
> 
>> If tor is incompetent to find HUGE funding for free, it may be time to 
>> setup an international tor paid option.
> 
> Many of TORs current high-bandwidth nodes are run by universities .. who 
> would be legally prohibited from participating in a for-profit system 
> (even if the model was just cost recovery). 

I'm not an attorney, your argument is a bit to be discussed, but I think 
you may be wrong saying that Universities can not be participating in a 
for-profit system.
May be not directly,
but first, I think universities can not ban the access to their 
established tor nodes to nobody, be an individual or a corporation that 
is reselling its anonymizer services.
Tor privacy success is also thanks to the many thousands users that 
provides a cover.

And second, universities are a key pilar of the US and global economy, 
and their collaborations and contributions to private for-profit 
companies are essential for the whole society progress.

It's also a lot easier to
> sell the idea of exposing yourself to endless abuse complaints if you 
> can use the "...but we're helping Chinese dissidents..." angle.

I don't understand this. Please elaborate.
> 
> If you want paid-for anonymity services, there's tons to choose from .. 
> but consider that once you attach payment to a username, you've created 
> an easily attributable path back to you. 

You may be wrong: There are hundreds of untraceable anonymous payments 
systems, but yes a bit annoying to set up.
Yes there are lot of commercial anonymizers, but I'm not sure yet if any 
one is as good as tor.

TOR from the coffee shop's wifi
> is a lot harder to trace.

Probably most if not all coffe shop's wifi are at this time under strict 
orwellian surveillance. And most of their servers and firewalls are for 
sure poorly setup. I'm not sure that communicating via tor from any of 
those wifi could be safe globally regarding anonymity/privacy/security, 
mostly if the coffee shop wifis are located at your adversary country.

> 
> I guess it depends on *why* you need the performance .. 

Why?: To establish tor-like systems as standard for all mere mortals for 
internet standard browsing, emailing, chatting, instant messaging, 
telecommuting, instead of the current weak clear text open Internet used 
today.
Tor-like Internet system should be forced as default minimal Internet 
quality standard by law to all ISP providers as a standard.

ISP and customers are refusing to talk about this by now, because they 
like privacy, but not at the cost of current poor tor performance.
Give them performance, and we can start talk.


if it's p2p
> you're trying to do (which you shouldn't be doing on TOR anyway) I'd 
> suggest you take a look at what the friendly pirates at PRQ have come up 
> with (Relakks .. www.relakks.com).

About P2p, here I like to have you. Good philosophical question.

I am not looking for performance for any specifically function, but yes, 
P2P (tor) performance must be also a priority, as millions users are 
demanding for it, and we are here not to feed our ego (err...me yes...), 
not to play with our perfect theoretical network tools, not to play to 
be God and to create the Law(s), but to satisfy the whole planet 
population demand (and need) for a safe, quality, fast, privacy focused 
Internet, P2P included.

P2p is a de-facto global, planet, humanity current behavior, and you nor 
anybody can be blind about that.

When THOUSAND MILLIONS of people are doing it because they don't 
consider it a crime, laws must be changed, as those millions of citizens 
ARE the law, are the planet, and most of them are our young people who 
will own the planet we will be so kind to create and deliver them.

As the P2P ethical problem is the money, and I think only the money, 
experts should find a solution to that question.
If it's not clear as per today on how humanity can all share for free 
(or for a low flat rate, or paid by the govs from taxes revenues, or 
whatever else system) its intellectual properties (ideas, patents, 
music, films, books, games, art, poetry, essays, conferences, software, 
knowledge, etc), but it is a GLOBAL CLAIM that intellectual property can 
not be owned by nobody but by all and should be donated to humanity. As 
are the air we respires, the sun, the clouds, the smiles, the language, etc.

P2P is the current perfect revolutionary TECHNOLOGICAL tool to 
distribute and deliver to the world in a quickly and low-cost manner all 
this intellectual property and other distributed communication goods.
P2P can deliver huge knowledge in a matter of minutes from your 
Cleveland State University to the last smallest faraway poorest African 
or Asian Village. It's a dream for any philanthropy educator. It will be 
for sure a key tool of the Humanity progress to create a fairer world, a 
better world.
You can teach hundreds of students from this remote village at the same 
time you are doing the same to your (richards) local students.
You can deliver via P2P your classes/video-conferences, books, images, 
etc. You will be surprised that many of your african students, after ten 
years of your teachings, can change heir world, can change our world for 
a better one, thanks to you and to your P2P teaching tools.

I am tired of tor gurus aiming to forbidden P2P. Really. Hiphocresy.
I will research some day on this list archives about this matter to 
publish the results on a blog, and to open a new tor+p2p thread that can 
be beautifully hot.

Tor must be prepared for the revolutionary P2P technology, anything else 
is stupid, retarded minded, coward.

PLease, you guys, I don't want to offend nobody, I'm a bit rude, I know, 
it's just my way of talking, but I am a kind man that respect all of 
you, be sure, and all this are only my opinions. Take it or not.

Thanks for reading and for giving your opinions!

Mac


> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Michael Holstein
> Cleveland State University
> 



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