Exclude... options and what about Tor v multi-hop proxies?

[Andrew Lewman]

On 02/27/2010 10:34 AM, maggie at hushmail.me wrote:
> With 25+ perfect-privacy routers in the network? I would say they 
> are built on top of the Tor. They don't all declare the family 
> option either but that is another matter.

I tested perfect privacy in 2009, it never used tor.  It was ssh tunnels
and openvpn connections, with some other option for http connect through
a squid proxy.  Perhaps the company runs tor relays on their servers for
cover traffic, or perhaps someone else runs these relays.

Their faq never mentions tor either,
http://www.perfect-privacy.com/faq.html.

> As a user I read the designer/developer provided documentation 
> trying to understand the system and trust their judgment/word when 
> it gets too deep for me to understand it. Not all of your users are 
> academics with PhDs.  Every other configuration is there in the 
> FAQ, compared with Tor, so I don't understand why these type of 
> services are excluded from the comparison. 

The wiki is written by volunteers, people like you.  If you don't
understand the wording, or dislike the detail, feel free to change it.

We don't compare ourselves to individual solutions because we're not in
competition with them.  There are literally thousands of "online
privacy" providers, sometimes called web proxies, sometimes vpns, and
sometimes ssh tunnels.  There are other websites, such as proxy.org,
that do a fine job of comparing the top solutions.

We do research and development into online privacy and anonymity.  Our
goal is to solve the hard problems that exist in the field today and
will exist in the near future.

> I did not post the question here as soon as it occurred to me. I 
> have spent considerable time reading around, including the entire 
> or-xxx archives to find such a comparison but found nothing except 
> (elsewhere) unproven claims and counter-claims from users or haters 
> of such systems. 

We compare ourselves to the general class of single-hop proxies (ssh,
vpn, http/https proxies) so users can understand the security and
anonymity properties that are different.  If someone wants to figure out
how to objectively evaluate all possible solutions and compare and
contrast, great.  We as the Tor Project, aren't going to do it.

-- 
Andrew Lewman
The Tor Project
pgp 0x31B0974B

Website: https://torproject.org/
Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/
Identi.ca: torproject
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