Posted on 07/01/2013 10:01:22 AM PDT by Nachum
Jihadists are seeking out more secure methods of online communications, including an avenue created by the U.S. government and financed by American taxpayers, in the wake of revelations about the U.S. monitoring of online messages.
The Tor network has become a go-to means for jihadists and criminals to communicate, raise money, and buy and sell illicit goods and services without fear of being identified or traced by intelligence or law enforcement officials.
The network uses technology called “onion routing” (Tor is an acronym for The Onion Router), which refers to layers of encryption that prevent governments or other users from obtaining information about users or websites hosted on the network.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
I accepted long ago that there is no such thing as internet security. Just look at the targetted ads that follow you where-ever you go.
Oh sure, the NSA, DOD and the rest of the government created the TOR
Network, but don’t have the Keys. Sure, and I have bridge for sale ...
“Just look at the targetted ads that follow you where-ever you go.”
Clear out all your cookies, then install and use Ghostery. Ghostery keeps all those trackers that enable the ad targeting from ever getting embedded on your computer. I learned about Ghostery on Free Republic, and I would recommend it to everyone else.
Get Ghostery for free here:
TOR isn’t about keys, it’s about decentralization. Encrypted communications can be cracked with the right quantum computing mechanism. If you’re using >1024 bit encryption with highly complex passwords, no amount of government computing power could crack your encryption in a timely manner. If they REALLY wanted to dedicate processing cycles to decryption, they could crack it in a couple days, but even the best computing resources don’t have the chops to decrypt 2048-bit encryption with a >20 character private key in less than 30 days.
I concur.
Very confident....
Computing power has surpassed your wildest dreams, I’m afraid.
The only quantum computers out there today are all Adiabatic quantum machines. There are some 512 qubit machines made in Canada and some of those are in the US but adiabatic just ain’t gonna cut it for factoring primes and similar problems..IMO.
They would need REAL quantum computers.
The Canadian D-Wave 512 qubit machine cannot factor primes as fast as a home-made array of graphics cards in a geeks basement.
I work in IT. I’ve been an engineer in data center construction, programming, systems and networks, and security. I can tell you personally that encryption can be cracked with enough time, but there are no supercomputers available on the quantum level yet and even those would require more than 24 hours to crack a 2048-bit encryption cipher.
Thank you for confirming this. True quantum computing is a few years if not decades away.
The weakest link in TOR is the last computer in your proxy chain.
Your communications comes out of that machine without encryption unless your target machine on the internet is SSL.
The next weakest link is you are able to be tracked by traffic analysis. It’s best for you if you run a TOR node since you are then handling traffic all the time and it’s impossible to filter out any traffic as being from you.
Next best thing to running a node is to not just jump on and start surfing...run TOR a while and do casual unimportant stuff on the connection and switch identities a few times and then later do anything sensitive... I prefer to get an exit node that is outside the US, Canada, UK, AUS, NZ....
Some people use a commercial proxy chain or VPN to then connect to TOR..this may be a bit more secure than TOR alone. try the free version of the VPN at http://proxpn.com/ it’s speed limited in the free version but adequate for web browsing.
Before using TOR for anything truly sensitive read all the relative info on the TOR site first!
I have a PC that is on the other side of the hardware firewall... I use it as a honeypot so I can watch and see who is interested in probing my ip. I have seen a lot of interesting stuff. There are tons of Chinese hacker attacks... I’d be surprised if a machine could stay uninfected for more than an hour without a firewall. A strange series of probes once occurred after I made a post on FR.... I went back and checked and a relatively new freeper had placed an image in a thread that was pointed to a server with a plain ip address. This was probably a server on their PC that was serving up the image and they were looking at the logs and probing the ip of anyone who read the thread.
My main PC is behind the firewall plus once a day it gets reloaded from a disk image so it’s always shiny and new... nothing stays put and nothing can alter eeprom on the mainboard or the HD boot sector. Data to be saved is sent to an external encrypted drive. The real machine is Linux, the honeypot is Windows ;-)
The entire intelligence community comes and probes FR. I know this because on my website’s site meter, I see their IP’s plainly bouncing from FR to my site. They do not hide themselves either. I have nothing to hide so I truly do not care, but it is unsettling to see it so blatantly there.
They also (probably) download and save everything that is posted.
What is your website?
Bttt
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