Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it | Engadget

seasonone@opidea.xyz to Technology@beehaw.org – 357 points –
Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it | Engadget
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The reason is privacy, everybody has a reason to use it.

In theory yes, but practically speaking trying to access a lot of the modern web over TOR would be at best painfully slow and at worst almost impossible thanks to DDoS protection providers like cloudflare.

This right here. A very large part of the web is inaccessible from TOR. Last I tried you couldn't access social media, Google constantly forces you through captchas because it thinks you're a bot, and anything on a CDN will either forces captchas or just doesn't work. Financial institutions absolutely are all inaccessible.

Privacy is important, but most of the places you want to go with TOR to stay private won't let you in because malicious actors want to use it for the same reasons.

Facebook has an official.onion domain and it's the only way I access it, as it's required for my employer.

While I agree with you, I'm wondering what the benefit is of watching youtube and posting/reading lemmy/mastodon through a tor network. Because those are the main things I do. While I do understand that in some countries and also in public wifi networks the chances of traffic being intercepted and man in the middle attacks are higher, I do not expect that to happen to my fibre connection in my western country.

Unless you browse Geocities sites from 1998, intercepting and MITMing is simply not an issue. Everything built nowadays uses https, which fully protects you against those.

Yeah people when they discuss Neworking and VPNs I've noticed are either illiterate to the existence of https or are deliberately not mentioning it for the purpose of misleading people in some way (in the case of VPN sponsorships it's to get people to buy them).