[tor-talk] Is this still valid?

[Seth David Schoen]

Seth David Schoen writes:

> If you read the original Tor design paper from 2004, censorship
> circumvention was actually not an intended application at that time:
> 
> https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/design-paper/tor-design.pdf
> 
> ("Tor does not try to conceal who is connected to the network.")

The connection to censorship circumvention is that, on a censored
network, people are normally not allowed to connect to censorship
circumvention services (that the network operator knows about).  So if
you allow the network operator to easily know who is connecting to the
service -- as the 2004 version of Tor always did -- they can block it
immediately (as several governments did when they noticed Tor was
becoming popular in their countries).

Now that Tor also has censorship circumvention as a goal, there are
several methods it can use to try to disguise the fact that a particular
person is connected to the Tor network.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
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