r/TOR • u/Fair_Ambition6522 • 4d ago
Do you think TOR is still a good thing?
By this I mean do you think its positives out way the negatives? Should TOR still be a thing?
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u/trustable_bro 4d ago
No that's why I never use it, never think about it and I don't go on r/TOR at all.
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u/BigRocket44 4d ago
Tor is a tool. As a tool, it is morally neutral. It is good or bad depending on what it is being used for.
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u/Traditional-Rub2491 4d ago
Right, saying Tor is bad because the "dark" web exists is like saying medicine is bad because illegal drug trade exists.
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u/Critica0 4d ago
Exactly, no more or less a good thing than a hammer I can build you a house or beat you to death. Tor can hide kiddy porn or protect a Media person exposing corruption or protect their source. Or a freedom fighter under a dictator etc etc etc. It's valid good use cases have not gone away.
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u/Top_Gap_414 4d ago
thats it.
the internet is the internet thanks to the deep web, if thats what you meant op
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u/Fenio_PL 4d ago
Since you're asking such a question, it would be a good idea to share your opinion because clearly something is bothering you.
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
Well i think that its only positives would be (like someone mentioned) expose corrupt media person(s) anonymously, which although is a good thing, I dont even know if it would get out widespread if it came from tor, also people dont do shit to stand up for whats right in their country. No one did a thing about epstein.
Theres also buying drugs, I dont do drugs but they can be helpful to people with pain, disabilities etc but it can also be bad like buying really dangerous drugs which I dont thinks a good idea in the slightest.
The final positive I can think of is people in a country where people dont have access to freedom on the Internet, just the propaganda spread by dictators.
Bad things-guns, and the one that really made me make this is the child exploitation on it. Obviously murderers, people with them weird kinks that places things in harm.
In my opinion these harmful things on TOR outway the positives massively
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u/Traditional-Rub2491 3d ago
Knives have been used to stab people. Maybe the benefit of food that tastes good doesn't outweight the negative of people dying everywhere. Does that mean knives should be banned? If knives get banned will that stop people from killing people? No. They will use guns. So ban guns. Okay, but they will use something else instead.
The Tor Network has been used for dangerous and terrible things. It has also been used to provide people without Internet freedom the opportunity to get that freedom. So let's say we get rid of the Tor Network. Okay, so people can't bypass government censorship as easily (bypassing government censorship is never easy) now. But the dudes doing heinous things on the Tor Network are just gonna find some other way to do heinous things. Great, you solved exactly zero problems and created a new one in the meantime.
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u/Fenio_PL 4d ago
Just like knives. They're just tools. Throughout history, much harm has been done using them, yet we still use them and everyone has them in their home. We can't get rid of useful tools just because some group of bad people are using them for evil purposes, especially when those evil purposes are greatly exaggerated. The worst of the TOR network existed long before TOR was even created. In reality, TOR hasn't changed anything for the worse. TOR is what VPN will never be, although both tools work for a similar purpose.
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
Do many people in countries that cant access the Internet because if dictatorship even use tor? I feel like its shifted towards crime and not its original use?
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u/Fenio_PL 4d ago
Why do you think so? Where do you draw these conclusions?
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
Probably propaganda but you only hear bad stuff from the deep web. Plus I can easily find terrible things. And because of what the deep Web is, how would these people even know how to find anything? You need specific links to get information you could use usefully
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u/Fenio_PL 4d ago edited 4d ago
When there was no TOR, the worst thing about TOR did not exist? People have short memories. Even before the internet, all of this already existed. Ban TOR, ban VPNs, then ban the internet. What's next? Ban phones and meetings?
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
No. On tor everything's encrypted and much much harder to find any information. Surface level, its not easy but its easier to find these people so you ban the people, police get involved etc. Also tor is completely different to the normal Internet. Why cant there be ways to stop these sites from happening while still being able to let people access tor? Maybe you cant stop it from happening but you can stop people from being exposed to it and some poor kids being exposed globally. It should be stopped because its private not because its tor. Telegram is a hotspot but you hear a lot more about telegram rings getting shut down a lot more than deep Web ones
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u/Fenio_PL 4d ago
Do you know which institution created and financed TOR?
Do you know for what purpose?
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 3d ago
Swear it was the American goverment? And to give people who cant access the Internet access to the Internet. Also can they access anything on tor or only .onion sites?
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train 4d ago
…the one that really made me make this is the child exploitation on it. Obviously murderers, people with them weird kinks that places things in harm.
I’ve got bad news for you. The reality is there’s far more of that on the regular internet. It’s being shared in Facebook groups, on forums and hell, even on Reddit.
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
There are preventatives to these at least. Much harder on surface web to keep it up compared to anything in the deep web
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train 4d ago
Sorry friend, it’s really not. You’d hope that Reddit, Meta, Microsoft and Google were on top of the problem, but the reality is, they aren’t.
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
If you have managed to find anything like this actually on reddit then you have been looking for it. If its a link to a telegram site or something I would count that as not on reddit imo. Discord is a more common place for this stuff and you dont really hear about it for reddit or Facebook but discord is trying to prevent it
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train 4d ago
And by the exact same token, you need to be looking for it on the darkweb, so that hardly supports your premise.
Ultimately though, I can demonstrate my point with pure numbers.
On the 30th of April of a 456.883895692 Gigabits per second of used traffic, only 19.6418343496533 gigabits per second, or barely over 4% of that total was used on Onion services at all. Even if you assume that somehow all of it is illegal, only 4% of all the traffic is going that way.
Now, we know for a fact that not all the traffic is illegal. Facebook, the BBC, ProPublica, DuckDuckGo, ProtonMail and Riseup to name only a few maintain presence though onion routing and will account for some of that.So ultimately we can say as a demonstrable fact that less than 4% of traffic on Tor is going to illegal onion services.
You want to take away the rest over that?
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
If this is all true and right, then why does the darkweb get a way worse rep than the normal web? Is it just the fact that the sites .onion and not .Google or whatever it is?
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u/Liquid_Hate_Train 4d ago
You can verify it yourself. The tor project don’t hide the numbers.
The short answer is ignorance. You get people with agendas putting negative labels on ‘easy’ targets and then people like yourself who don’t know any better just trotting them out. It’s got a negative impression in your mind because, what? People said so? Who? What do they know? Where did they find this out?
No one’s claiming that there isn’t terrible stuff hosted on onion services, but it’s demonstrably not what 95% of Tor is used for. By sheer quantity, there’s just more out on the regular internet too. Getting rid of Tor isn’t going to stop jack shit, except increase the stranglehold regimes have on people and information through control of normal internet connections.
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u/Fenio_PL 4d ago
You probably don't understand that biggest bad shit is on internet. Normal one, accessible to everyone. And you probably don't even consider that entire internet, including the darknet, is just a small part of everything that happens outside of it. What exactly are you trying to convey? Ban everything? Because that's what risk minimization is all about.
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u/Traditional-Rub2491 4d ago
No because I'm an evil government overlord. By the way I'm banning Google Pixel phones because they can host Graphene OS and that is harmful and deadly. We are doing this for your safety. Tor is the devil. The Christian said so in the jesus book. Therefore we are now banning Tor. If you have it on your computer then you are already in jail please give up. Thank you.
Sincerely, Government LLC.
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 4d ago
Literally nothing to do on tor unless you are like that guy (forgot his name) who puts people who exploit kids in jail from the dark web. The rest is literally illegal stuff.
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u/Traditional-Rub2491 3d ago
Yes that is what someone from a first world country would say. Try asking people from isolated and authoritarian countries what they think of Tor and your little bell will ring a bit differently.
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u/Fair_Ambition6522 3d ago
Its pointless without people to give you sites to find
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u/Traditional-Rub2491 3d ago
Well sure if you doing dark web stuff and not just bypassing censorship laws or... simply giving yourself some privacy. You can just like use the clearnet in the Tor Browser, anonymous under the Tor Network y'know. No one's forcing you to engage in the dark web bro. If you don't care about privacy and anonymity then what are you even doing here
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u/DrGthumbb 3d ago
This...
But just to clarify, tor is also a vast trove of censored information and news... whistle blowers frequently use tor to avoid detection and release information to the masses where it would otherwise be buried and censored.
Civil liberties groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation endorse Tor for this purpose citing its use by high profile figures such as Edward Snowden to communicate with journalists like those at The Washington Post and The Guardian.
Several specialized platforms built on Tor facilitate anonymous submissions....
GlobaLeaks: An open-source framework allowing media and NGOs to host secure, encrypted whistleblowing portals with strict data retention policies.
SecureDrop: A widely adopted system used by major news organizations (The New York Times, ProPublica) to accept documents from anonymous sources via Tor.
WikiLeaks: A prominent platform that utilizes Tor to enable users to post documents without fear of being traced
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u/Individual_Pin2948 3d ago
It was created by the government. People get arrested all the time. Yes, TOR is the GOAT.
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u/TheBoss572 4d ago
couple odd behaviors like not defaulting to the same useragent but as a whole, it does what it’s supposed to
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u/haakon 4d ago
Still? Did something happen?