Do you use tor?

[yada]

Do average people have a use for it? It seems like the way to go but I tried it and its slow. What do you use it for, leaking stories to the new York times when you are in a communist country? Funny that America invented it and yet it stops the NSA from spying on its own people.

[Falcon69]

wow! you are just paranoid about everything today Yada, who spit in your Wheaties this morning?

And FYI, NSA is always spying on you, and it's own people. 

[floobydust]

Privacy on the internet is a myth.
Every website has tracking analytics and your Terms of Use Agreements permit sharing your information with "affiliates", so data mining and correlation is easy.
Monetizing your private information is the new revenue model although I have yet to see how targeted advertising is actually making money for corporations.

I use Tor for sensitive stuff regarding health or if my IP needs to be masked when posting to seedy websites. Also to bypass the regional crap.

[steve30]

I've used Tor just for the sake of it, but I don't really have any practical use for it (at the moment).

It'll be good to have around in case I do need it though.

[Ampera]

I use it to cheat strawpolls.

[Vgkid]

I have used it a few times, mainly to see if certain sites are working. It appears to be working better now(still very slow,and unuseable for a bunch of sites) , at least the cloudfare (prove that you are human) issue seems to be mostly fixed.

[Halcyon]

Privacy on the internet is a myth.

Only if you don't really know what you're doing. It's not too difficult to remain private and anonymous online. It just takes a bit of discipline and not posting your life on social media.

[electrolust]

Funny that America invented it and yet it stops the NSA from spying on its own people.

Actually it does not do that.  You don't quite understand how it works.

[CopperCone]

Of course the government spies on people. Not in the way that you think. Usually all the really intrusive stuff is basically weapons testing, penetration testing, etc.

What the government likes to do is experiment on people. All it takes is one guy with some people under him getting really anxious about a tactic working or not.. and boom you suddenly have off the books experimentation.

They are paranoid. Everyone is into hacking now (but the government does other weird ass shit like MK ultra )

Kind of like the immune system having an allergic response. Some might argue its out of whack. Some might argue its whacky and they hire paranoid cocaine addicts. In the end you just need to have big balls.

[Red Squirrel]

It's kinda slow and cumbersome to use as an every day thing but I sometimes use it for fun, or if I want to research something that could be seen as questionable by the government.   If anything I might use it to search recipes or something for no reason other than to make the government worry.  "why is he using Tor now and not a while ago?".  They can decrypt all that, but it still requires lot of work on their part.

I have also browsed some onion sites, it's kinda neat that it's basically a whole different "world" to explore.  Like forums that you can only access through Tor.  I have a decent amount of bandwidth at home and decent server infrastructure, so I want to setup a relay at some point (not an exit node though) and maybe even a .onion site for fun.

[yada]

It's kinda slow and cumbersome to use as an every day thing but I sometimes use it for fun, or if I want to research something that could be seen as questionable by the government.   If anything I might use it to search recipes or something for no reason other than to make the government worry.  "why is he using Tor now and not a while ago?".  They can decrypt all that, but it still requires lot of work on their part.

I have also browsed some onion sites, it's kinda neat that it's basically a whole different "world" to explore.  Like forums that you can only access through Tor.  I have a decent amount of bandwidth at home and decent server infrastructure, so I want to setup a relay at some point (not an exit node though) and maybe even a .onion site for fun.

How do you do the .onion sites? Do you have to search for them on the www web then just type them in as you go to each one? Any good recipes for onions?

[Jeroen3]

You have to get the hash for the .onion by other means. With TOR, there can't be a "master name server". That would be a major vulnerability.
The hidden services (.onion pages) are actually really clever.

[apelly]

You have to use it occasionally, lest the time you need it in the future sticks out as very interesting traffic indeed.

[TerraHertz]

I have it installed, and use it now and then. The original need was when a news site I read ( http://iceagenow.info ) was being blocked by Optus servers. My cable ISP... Tor was a way to get around that.

Another thing it was useful for recently, was checking whether I was shadow-banned on a particular youtube channel. Answer: yes, I am. When I am logged into my google/youtube account, then my posts on that channel appear normally. When I visit cloaked by Tor, there are zero posts by TerraHertz to be seen. Same comment count though, which is amusing.

News to me that youtube even has that feature.  Quite evil and dishonest really. An ordinary ban, fine. Pretending a user is not banned when they effectively are, is dishonest.

[yada]

I have it installed, and use it now and then. The original need was when a news site I read ( http://iceagenow.info ) was being blocked by Optus servers. My cable ISP... Tor was a way to get around that.

Another thing it was useful for recently, was checking whether I was shadow-banned on a particular youtube channel. Answer: yes, I am. When I am logged into my google/youtube account, then my posts on that channel appear normally. When I visit cloaked by Tor, there are zero posts by TerraHertz to be seen. Same comment count though, which is amusing.

News to me that youtube even has that feature.  Quite evil and dishonest really. An ordinary ban, fine. Pretending a user is not banned when they effectively are, is dishonest.

Craigslist will do that if you try to sell the same thing too many times. Even if you change the post around it still does it. I let someone use my CL account and they over posted and the phone calls just stopped one day.

[ZeTeX]

I used to browse the dark net a lot, just for fun, see what I could find.
most of the thing I found I could also google them and find on the clear web though.
for anybody who is looking for a start:
google the hidden wiki and find a link, it won't be too hard. From there start finding sites.

[SeanB]

Just remember that, by default, every TOR node is also effectively an exit node, though the higher bandwidth you have the more likely it is that you will be used as both a node and as an exit or entry node as well. If you rate limit it you will be barely used, as there will be faster peers around to transfer traffic, but even rate limited you will still be doing traffic transfers.