Sorry, no answer, but that is the question we need to be asking.Īs economics continually tries to get over to people, there really are no solutions. Once the tools are introduced into Tor to make that possible then other people will start using them too, on other subjects. And that's also true of a little bit of censorship. But I'm equally aware, as a glance at our own economies shows, that a little government and a little taxation all to readily turns into the bureaucrats asking for 50% of our incomes or diversity advisers will die. A little government, a little taxation, even a little censorship. I tend to think that a little of most things is a good idea. This isn't something that I've got a glib answer to either. But that then introduces a method of censorship to Tor and that's not the point of the system at all. The researchers who collated this data do say that it might be possible to monitor the dark web, note those that are about paedophilia and then censor them and only them. The real public policy question here is are we going to put up with 900 child porn sites as a distressing but worthwhile cost of those good things that Tor allows?
CP ON TOR DARK WEB FREE
And sure we like to say that we've got free speech and all that stuff but the very existence of a system that cannot be censored aids in keeping other speech free. But there's also people in regimes with heavy censorship who are able to communicate without the authorities finding them. Tor also has value, "good" value if you like. Yes, 900 sites too many.īut then think again for a moment. And that's the one where they say there's 45,000 destination sites on this dark web under Tor, and 2% of them are about paedophilia. If we measure the number of times the waiter has to come to the table we're not going to be accurately measuring alcohol intake, are we?īut I want to point to a very different number. To put it into terms that an old toper like me is comfortable some people drink their win by the litre carafe (and, as an old toper, why don't they have 2 litre carafes?), some like a fresh small glass each time. It's safe to say that the method chosen might be the best available but it's a horribly misleading one to give us a good picture of the true usage patterns. There's more there for those interested in the technical details. But if you spend 1 second each at 100 hidden services, you make about 100 requests.) Therefore, obsessive users who visit many sites in a session account for many more of the requests that this study measures than users who visit a smaller number of sites with equal frequency. (If you spend hours at one hidden service, you make about 1 hidden service directory request. Basically, a Tor client makes a hidden service directory request the first time it visits a hidden service that it has not been to in a while. That’s over five times as many as any of the other categories of content that he and his researchers found in their Dark Web survey, such as gambling, bitcoin-related sites or anonymous whistle-blowing.įirst, some background. More than four out of five Tor hidden services site visits were to online destinations with pedophilia materials, according to Owen’s study. The study paints an ugly portrait of that Internet underground: drug forums and contraband markets are the largest single category of sites hidden under Tor’s protection, but traffic to them is dwarfed by visits to child abuse sites. I forsee something very similar happening here: We've already had at least one senior cop shouting that Google and Apple shouldn't encrypt phones because that might endanger one child, one hypothetical child at some hypothetical future date. The way the numbers are presented I'd give it no more than 72 hours before someone, somewhere, tells us that as a matter of public policy Tor must be disabled, shut down or otherwise censored. There's a fairly shocking piece of research floating around out there telling us how much of the traffic on Tor, the anonymising system, is apparently people searching for child porn and paedohilia.