sporksmith

After the "trust nothing" security model in the rest of the article I found it funny to complain that a hardware kill switch is useless when you can just trust the software to do it for you

> The switch is useless in either of these threat models:

> To prevent cell tower triangulation, you can simply enable airplane mode and it is just as effective.

Folks are saying to practice your fall-possibility-sport where a fall won't hurt as much. I say take it a step further and do focused practice of falling and rolling intentionally. There are a lot of videos on YouTube about how to do so.

When I started long boarding at ~38, I practiced throwing myself into a roll first from a crouch, then standing, then standing on the board - onto grass of course. It helped a lot when I did inevitably have unplanned falls on the pavement.

In my journaling I realized the process of writing was valuable, but I rarely referred back to anything. So for personal / stream of consciousness things I either write on paper and put it in the shred pile, or to something like an ephemeral vim buffer.

For when I'm feeling very self conscious I have a script that turns off echoing to the terminal and streams everything I write to the clipboard (in case I decide I want to review/save after all)

True, but it'd be difficult to both make arrests based on info learned from having broken Tor, and keep it secret that they'd broken Tor. It's possible by obscuring how they got information (e.g. via parallel construction), but difficult to do at scale.

This article is from 2013, and notes a huge increase in tor clients. While the article notes we weren't able to determine the cause of the sudden increase, the primary hypothesis put forward was that it was a true growth in usage due to new anti-piracy laws in Russia. It doesn't note any particular attacks this may signify, and I'm not aware of deanonymization attacks that involve adding a lot of clients to the network.

The larger concern for deanonymization is typically flooding the network with relays, since it increases the ability to do e.g. timing-based de-anonymization attacks. This is a bit of an arms race. As @ajvs points out though, the known cases of tor users being de-anonymized were not due to attacking Tor itself, but via other channels. I'm not aware of any known real-world cases of users being deanonymized by attacking or analyzing Tor itself, let alone users being "arrested regularly"

Tor dev here! We're super excited about this launch!

The lead dev on this feature, who also wrote the blog post, is taking some well deserved r&r after getting this feature out the door. I was somewhat tangentially involved (I work on the Shadow simulator, which we used to test, evaluate, and tune this feature) but can take a stab at answering questions.

Otoh comments on the blog post itself are likely to be seen by more experienced tor devs than myself :)

... No? Could you be more specific?

Disclaimer: am a Tor developer and employee.