Tor Mainly Used For Drug Forums And Pedophilia Sites?

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It would be pretty damn creepy if the results of this study are accurate. And here I thought piracy would have been the biggest use for Tor. :eek:

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.
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The article isn't truthfully stating the obvious. TOR avers you CAN NOT surf porn web-sites unless you activate scripts. Otherwise, you are no longer anonymously surf the web. :cool:
 
Well, yeah. Those kinds of sites don't last long on the public internet. Secure sockets are fairly to very safe for most other uses, at least when it doesn't involve pedophilia and illegal drug dealing.
 
Not surprising, IMO. Most people just don't have any use for TOR, and those who need security, won't likely risk their data jumping around several more locations (encryption, protocols, security, or not).
 
I've been playing around in the Tor world lately. The .onion site mixup seems to be equal parts drugs, guns, and fake IDs, with the occasional free speech site thrown in. Even in the "deep web", child abuse sites are rare. Maybe it's because I'm not really lookin' for them, though. Who knows? Most of the tor sites appear to be unconfigured or poorly configured blank web pages. The most interesting onion site I've ever found was a "chan" style image board which focused on trains. It had a lot of pictures of the inside of the engines, which I've never seen before. Given how long that took to load, I think I can understand why there aren't a lot of pedo sites - Tor's just a bad medium for graphic media. It's too slow!

Drugs, though? Yeah. Seems to be a lot of those. Oddly, it also feels very international. I have a better chance of the site headlines being in a language I don't speak than one I do!
 
Anything that promises anonymity will inevitably attract the more unsavory element on the net. But because access is becoming more and more restricted for those elements,such services inevitably attract the attention of law enforcement agencies as well. And given the tactics that some of them use,we know there's no real anonymity any more.
 
I think you've misread the article. It says that the TOR services which provide this sort of stuff (and much else besides) count for only 2% of TOR traffic:

Tor executive director Roger Dingledine followed up in a statement to WIRED pointing out that Tor hidden services represent only 2 percent of total traffic over Tor’s anonymizing network. .
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Quartz-1 said:
I think you've misread the article. It says that the TOR services which provide this sort of stuff (and much else besides) count for only 2% of TOR traffic:
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He has indeed.

Statement 1: Child abuse websites account for 2 percent of Tor hidden service websites.

Statement 2: Excluding bot traffic 83 percent of visits to Tor hidden service websites were related to child abuse.

Statement 3: Tor hidden services represent 2 percent of total traffic over Tor's anonymizing network.
 
The Forbes article gives some actual numbers rather than percentages: they counted 45,000 hidden service sites, so the study's 2% of sites must equal about 900 pedo sites.

The Wired article notes that most of those sites lasted only a few days or weeks: "Less than one in six of the hidden services that was online when Owen’s study began remained online at the end of it." Which means less than 150 sites stayed online for the duration of the study.

Most of the articles do report that the study acknowledged that getting accurate counts of this sort of thing is nearly impossible. This is just a first fumbling attempt to learn how to start getting a handle on the scale of the problem. At least somebody is trying to start doing something about it; this is not frivolous like so many other so-called studies.
 
Anonymizing is bad, mm'kay? Only pedos and druggies use it. Mm'kay? We should make them "more open" government survellience (even though they probably already are in reality). Mm'kay?
 
Wierdo said:
How does 2 percent translate to "mostly" exactly?
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It never did. Steve interpreted "Over 80 Percent of Dark-Web Visits Relate to Pedophilia, Study Finds" as applying to all of Tor. Only 2 percent of Tor traffic is "Dark-Web".

There is another 2 percent that gets confused with that 2 percent. 2 percent of the "Dark-Web" sites on Tor are child porn sites, they generated 83% of visits to the "Dark-Web" as measured by the study. The way the study measured the visits is problematic.
 
Never have I felt so out of touch on tech. I have no idea what a service on tor is. Then again, I've never used Tor, so maybe that's why I know nuttin. No matter how you look at it, there are so many qualifiers in the article, it's hard to know if there's any significance or not. Here's hoping that most of the pedo service traffic is law enforcement
 
Madoc said:
Anonymizing is bad, mm'kay? Only pedos and druggies use it. Mm'kay? We should make them "more open" government survellience (even though they probably already are in reality). Mm'kay?
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On the other hand, should we not be attempting to de-anonymize child pornographers? "Oh well, they're anonymous on a part of the web that human rights activists might use, so that's okay, we'll let them slide for the greater good."

Come to think of it, are human rights activists actually using Tor hidden services? Why don't we see any numbers about that?
 
sounds like propaganda to keep people off, or scared to try tor.
also propaganda for pro-publicizing or anti-anonymous

seriously doubt that much anon traffic has to do with kiddie porn.
 
This is blateant propaganda from Wired to stop people from using Tor, NSA/GCHQ has a much lower success rate of tracking a user while they use Tor, the more people that use it the better. Don't forget Wired was has also run several OpEd's from Snowden haters, while I am all for hearing all sides of an issue, not calling out the BS reflects poorly on Wired imho.
 
evilsofa said:
Come to think of it, are human rights activists actually using Tor hidden services? Why don't we see any numbers about that?
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From the article in question:

"Whistleblower sites like SecureDrop and Globaleaks, which allow anonymous users to upload sensitive documents to news organizations, accounted for 5 percent of Tor hidden service sites, but less than a tenth of a percent of site visits."
 
From the article... More than four out of five Tor hidden services site visits were to online destinations with pedophilia materials, according to Owen’s study.
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So that means that he is counting any file sharing site as a pedo site. If he finds a single pedo image on The Pirate Bay it is therefore classed as a pedo site for his research.

Standard twisted stats. Add that in with the comments above above how little percentage of TOR is dark web and you come out with standard scare-mongering propaganda.


It is down to Geeks like Us to educate the masses. Explain to them that being anonymous and not tracked is a right that should be protected.
 
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