disadvantage

I first discovered Arena through their Twitter profile. They post so much interesting stuff. It's what Tumblr should have been from the start. I just hope it is sustainable well into the future. There's too many important ideas that could be wiped out if this gets shut down.

> Do people just assume it's compromised

One of Tor's weaknesses has always been the exit node problem, where things can be seen in the clear unless encryption is used. And sometimes it's not used, so personal data can be gleaned through exits.

Another weakness is the Tor Browser Bundle itself. I'm not certain if it's 'compromised' but we'll never know, due to the secret nature of 0-days. People don't take extra caution and connect to Tor with a specialized Tor router with a kill-switch / fail-closed system, thereby mitigating real IP leaks.

There's also a more academic in nature problem of a 'bird's eye view' of the Tor network, whereby if you control and have insight into all the hops a Tor user makes, you can do correlation attacks, but I'm less concerned about that than the other two weaknesses I mentioned.

> Gmail have turned off the basic HTML view. The new interface is unpleasant.

It's not the UI that bothers me (it's actually quite nice and modern) it's that it loads like treacle, when in the past I exclusively used the basic HTML interface as it was more snappier & performant.