Category Archives: Tor Browser

CHINAS GREAT FIREWALL, a massive system of Internet filters and blocking, has long had a crack in it. The firewall prevents most users inside China from accessing platforms outside the country, such as Facebook, Google and Netflix, in keeping with Chinas desire to censor what can be seen and read. But popular software known as virtual private networks, or VPNs, permit a user inside China to tunnel through the firewall. Now the crack is being gradually cemented up.

A VPN has been particularly useful for foreign firms that come to China and want to link up with corporate networks outside it. Hoping to encourage such investment, China looked the other way for years at the existence of the VPNs, many available from Apples App Store in China. Some were easy to use just tap the button and a user would be on Facebook as if sitting in Los Angeles instead of Beijing. The VPNs are popular among millions of young people, as well as journalists and others.

China has been heading toward restricting them for some time, but now it is cracking down in earnest with a new cybersecurity law that carries criminal penalties. According to a BBC report, Apple informed more than 60 VPNs that they were being removed from the App Store in China on grounds that they were not licensed, although some others remain. Apples chief executive, Tim Cook, said last week we would obviously rather not remove the apps but Apple will follow the law wherever we do business. Likewise, a Chinese company that operates Amazons cloud-computing business in China has sent a notice reminding customers to comply with local laws and cease using software such as VPNs that could pierce the Great Firewall. (Amazon founder Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Apple, Amazon and other Western technology pioneers can have a positive influence on China, but the laws they obey can also become tools of censorship. Mr. Cook said this week that Apple has been engaging with China over this even when we disagree. But there is no evidence that Chinas leaders are prepared to loosen the reins of control. The trend is running the other way.

In Russia, no Great Firewall exists and major Internet platforms are accessible, but a government agency does blacklist specific sites. Now, President Vladimir Putin has signed legislation outlawing the use of VPNs and other methods that permit users to connect to the Internet anonymously, such as the Tor browser. Mr. Putin also signed legislation that will require instant-messaging services to establish the identity of users by their phone numbers another step to make sure no one escapes surveillance if the state deems it necessary.

In both Russia and China, the impulse is the same: Rulers fear the free flow of information.

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China and Russia go further in squelching Internet freedom - Washington Post

Malware and hacking tools are established parts of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's toolkit when it comes to unmasking criminal suspects on the Tor anonymity network. In a new case revolving around someone blackmailing children, FBI agents sent the suspect a digitally-poisoned movie file that obtained the target's real IP address.

Though the FBI has used hacking techniques in a wide, controversial manner, the tactic used here highlights how the bureau can identify suspects in a much more targeted way too.

Monday, prosecutors announced charges against Buster Hernandez, 26, of Bakersfield, California. Hernandez is charged with threats to use an explosive device and sexual exploitation of a child. He is suspected of using the moniker "Brian Kil."

Since 2015, Brian Kil has used social media, email, and VoIP to communicate with a number of underage female victims and extort sexual photos from them, according to the criminal complaint. Under duress, some victims sent explicit images and videos to Kil.

When Kil used sites like Facebook to harass victims, investigators found he was always hidden either behind an anonymous proxy or the Tor network, meaning authorities could not simply subpoena relevant companies for the suspect's IP address.

"Your time is running out. You though [sic] the police would find me by now but they didn't. They have no clue," Kil wrote to one of the victims. As the harassment, threats, and publication of sexually explicit photos continued, law enforcement even held a community forum at Plainfield High School in January last year to discuss the case. Kil allegedly forced one of his victims to attend and report back, according to the complaint.

On June 9, Magistrate Judge Debra McVicker Lynch authorized the use of a Network Investigative Technique (NIT), an FBI blanket term for malware, exploits, and hacking tricks. The idea, the complaint adds, was to obtain Kil's real IP address.

The complaint explains how the FBI's tactic worked.

In this case, the FBI was authorized to add a small piece of extra code to a video file produced by one of the victims. Posing as the victim, the FBI then sent the booby-trapped file to Kil via Dropbox.

"Uploading now. Did you get it," a message from the undercover FBI agent to Kil reads, according to text messages included in the complaint. (The video did not include any depictions of a minor engaged in sexually explicit activity, the complaint reads).

Judging by the complaint, the NIT was successful. "When Kil viewed the video containing the NIT on a computer the NIT disclosed the true IP address associated with the computer used by Kil," the document adds.

Armed with the IP address, investigators then filed an emergency subpoena with the relevant internet service provider and were given a physical address. After intercepting communications to and from that IP address, investigators found someone viewed a photograph of the Columbine killers, according to the complaint. Kil, it turned out, had posted the same photo when he threatened the Plainfield School District in 2015. Physical surveillance showed that resident Buster Hernandez was always present when Tor was being used in the home.

Several recent cases have shown the FBI using hacking tricks in a targeted manner. In May, Forbes reported on an investigation in which the FBI used a similar technique but with Word documents rather than a video file.

These stand in stark contrast to the agency's broader use of malware. Motherboard found the FBI used a Tor Browser exploit to hack over 8,000 computers in 120 different countries.

Although this latest case doesn't highlight any vulnerabilities in the Tor network itself, it does act as a reminder that there are ways of deanonymizing people in a targeted way using novel or unorthodox law enforcement techniques.

Got a tip? You can contact this reporter securely on Signal at +44 20 8133 5190, OTR chat at jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com

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The FBI Booby-Trapped a Video to Catch a Suspected Tor ... - Motherboard

The Tor software is a common tool among consumers who prefer to enjoymore privacy while accessing the internet on a regular basis. However, we also know the Tor software is not without its flaws. The developer of this browser hasacknowledged that furtherimprovements need to be made. A batch of new features wasannounced earlier this week. All of these improvements should make Tor a much safer tool.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the Tor software and the people who use it. Someautomatically assume that anyone using Tor must be frequenting the darknet. However, the vast majority of people utilizingTor do so to access regular websites. Thebrowser provides more privacy and anonymity features than any other browsing software in the world today. It is no surprise that a lot of people would prefer this software for regular internet usage.

Tors developer has clarified another myth surrounding the usage of this software. The NSA does not run half the relays used by the network by any means. With over 8,000 relays on a global scale, that would require a ton of resources to pull off. Some intelligence agencies doset up temporary relays every now and then. The vast majority, however, are run by independent users with no political agenda whatsoever.

The biggest announcement concernedsome new features coming to a Tor browser near you. The team has partnered with Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium to improve traffic analysis resistance. This method is often used to identify Tor users with relative ease. Stepping up countermeasure efforts should result in making it a lot more difficult to de-anonymize onion services in the future.

The Tor protocol will switch to a new cryptosystem using elliptic curve cryptography keys such as Ed25519. At present, the protocol continues torely on the first 80 bits of the SHA-1 of a 1024-bit RSA key. Althoughthis has worked quite well so far, the system hasgotten a bit outdated. Especially consideringthe progress made in quantum computing, the time is now to come up with improved solutions which guarantee additional privacy for all users. One always has to prepare for whatever the future may hold.

Further changes include making it more difficult to set up relays to target particular onion services. This will be done through an improved hidden service directory design functioning similarly toDNS for the regular internet. The current use of HSDir relays is too predictable in the mindsof the developers. Tackling this problem will not be an easy feat, but it should be feasible to improve upon this feature in the coming months and years.

Perhaps the most intriguing new features come in the form of different deployment models. Tor users can now sacrifice location privacy for performance and scalability if they wish to do so. This method hasbeen used by services such as Facebook already to improve load times and so forth, and it makes sense to integrate different deployment models. Making Tor the new standard among Internet browsers will not be easy, but all of these steps pave the way toward achieving that goal.

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Major Improvements Are Coming Soon to the Tor Browser - The Merkle

Digital privacy has had a very bad summer. As China and Russia move to block virtual private network services, well over a billion people face losing their best chance at circumventing censorship laws. First, China asked telecom companies to start blocking user access to VPNs that didn't pass government muster by next February. More recently, Russian president Vladimir Putin signed a law to ban VPNs and other anonymous browsing tools that undermine government censorship.

As citizens of these countries and people around the world scramble to understand the repercussions, US-based companies that operate in the countries have been swept up in the controversy. Apple complied with a Chinese government order to remove VPNs from its Chinese iOS AppStore, and the company that runs Amazon's cloud services in China this week said it would no longer support VPN use. Even hotels around China that offered VPN services to foreign visitors are largely curtailing the practice.

China and Russia's recent actions aren't new movements toward censorship, but they are escalations. And they leave citizens with few viable options for accessing the open internet.

While the suppressive efforts share the same end goal, they do take different forms. China has laid the foundation for its "Great Firewall" for more than two decades, attempting to control citizens' internet access on a very large scale. Creating and upgrading such a system over time takes massive resources. While Putin has praised the approach, Russia doesn't have a comparable apparatus. Instead, since about 2012, the Kremlin has gradually built up a web of legislation that shapes and controls the Russian internet through legal force more than technical control.

"These crackdowns and ratcheting up of internet censorship in China tend to ebb and flow, and so it is possible that eventually we may see VPNs sort of silently reappear," says Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "In Russia what theyre doing is theyre passing more and more draconian laws that are extremely difficult to implement. The reason for this is it makes sure that at any given time everyone is breaking the lawanyone that the government wants to target and wants to lean on for information is in violation of the law."

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Both approaches have made Russia and China insular markets, challenging for international companies to operate in. Apple, which has been accused of hypocrisy for pushing back against government surveillance in the US while complying with VPN takedown requirements in China, worked for years to enter the Chinese market. "We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries we follow the law wherever we do business," company CEO Tim Cook said in an earnings call on Tuesday. "We strongly believe participating in markets and bringing benefits to customers is in the best interest of the folks there and in other countries as well."

The VPN crackdowns in China and Russia came as no surprise to those who follow digital rights closely. "We expected it at some point, it wasn't like we didnt know where it came from," says Robert Knapp, the CEO of the Romanian VPN provider CyberGhost, which had its app removed from the iOS AppStore in China. "We had seen the Chinese government putting more and more pressure on VPN providers in a technical senseblocking our IPs, blocking the server infrastructure we were using, detecting traffic from certain sources."

After years of investing in technical control, China now seems focused on experimenting with regulatory enforcement as well. In the Xinjiang region of western China, reports indicate that the government is requiring citizens to install spyware on their smartphonesostensibly for anti-terrorism initiativesand is doing random stops to check whether local residents have complied. They have also arrested citizens over conversations in private chatrooms, indicating that the local government may be actively taking advantage of the spyware. "We are extremely alarmed. This is about as far as a nation-state has gone to submit its people to monitoring," Jeremy Malcolm, a senior global policy analyst at EFF, said of the situation in Xinjiang.

For its part, the Russian government has moved swiftly since 2012 to regulate both infrastructure and content such that is has extensive control of the internet at this point. After the Russian government took broad control of television and media in the early 2000s, the internet was the only place left for free communication. "Now the government is trying to close in on that," says Rachel Denber, the deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. "Its the logical progression of things. Once you go down the road of trying to expand state control over online communication, [banning VPNs] would be the next post to hit."

The Russian government may also be reacting to the current geopolitical situation, in which the country has been called out for hacking numerous Western countries , particularly leading up to democratic elections. "The authorities may also be looking ahead to the 2018 [Russian] presidential election, and they might want to take preemptive steps to ensure that no opposition mobilization takes place online," Denber notes.

For now there are still some ways around the Chinese and Russian governments' internet barriers, if you're willing to accept the risk. iPhones can only download apps from the App Store (unless a unit is jailbroken, which is not impossible but technically difficult, and introduces a host of security vulnerabilities). Android phones, though, can still sideload VPN apps from third-party app stores, since users aren't required to get apps from the Play Store. Google doesn't even operate its Play Store in China. For now, it's also easier to download desktop VPNs than mobile ones.

Other anonymizing tools besides VPNs remain a viable option as well, like the Tor Browser . That may carry more risk in Russia, though, given the recent arrest of someone who ran an Tor exit nodea gateway between the service and the internetthe country recently [lost a Tor exit node] for participating in protests. Using Tor Browser in China, meanwhile, requires extensive technical skill, to get around the Great Firewall.

It's also possible to install VPNs on devices while in other countries, and then use them in Russia or China. And end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Signal are a totally separate way of communicating and potentially receiving uncensored information without dealing with VPNs at all.

Experts report that both China and Russia may enact anti-VPN enforcement through checkpoints and arrests to intimidate citizens. "We are still used in Russia, we still count downloads, our Russian community is actually still growing," CyberGhost's Knapp says. "But instead of simply blocking VPN traffic, the Russian government is pulling another string now. They forbid it and they are going to enforce itmaybe brutally enforce it."

There could be unforeseen side effects as well. At the same time that eliminating these tools helps governments expand surveillance and control access to information, banning them also has the potential to degrade countries' overall security posture. Institutions that don't have access to VPNs could be at increased risk of being infiltrated or breached by foreign attackers. And if repressive governments set their sights on encryption next, they could undermine the integrity of basic economic drivers like secure digital transactions.

The dangers of banning VPNs are clear and pressing from a human rights standpoint. But countries that pursue it regardless may find they lose more than they intended.

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The Attack on Global Privacy Leaves Few Places To Turn - WIRED

At the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas, one of the three co-founders of Tor, Roger Dingledine, corrected a few misconceptions regardingwhat the Tor Project is really being used for and slammed journalists for the negative way it has been covered in the media. According to Dingledine, a mere 3% of Tor users employthe browser to access .onion websites.

According to The Register, Roger Dingledine decided to use part of his speaking time at DEF CON to criticize journalists for the way they have painted the Tor Project in the media as a tool for drug dealers and pedophiles to hide from law enforcement and get away with criminal activity.

He added that only 3% of Tor users connect to hidden (.onion) websites, meaningthe other 97% use the browser to anonymously browse clearnet sitessuch as Reddit, Wikipedia, Yahoo, and The Merkle. In Dingledines mind, most Tor users are just people wishing to hide their identities from website owners, not new-age criminals.

Dingledine even dismissed the concept of the dark web, implying that what people call the dark web is so insignificant that it should not even get its own term. He notably stated:

There is basically no dark web. It doesnt exist. Its only a very few webpages.

During his talk, he also addressed the fear of law enforcement agencies infiltratingthe network and running a large number of nodes. The concernis that this would allow them to reveal the true identity of Tors users.

Edward Snowden had previously revealed that nodes were being run by intelligence agencies. According to Dingledine, however, there were only a few such infiltrators and these could not compromise the network. He added that he himself knew two-thirds of the people running Tor relays, and that agencies do not need to set up nodes of their own. If they really wanted to compromise the network, they could merely monitor those who do run them.

The Tor Projects co-founder revealed that the most visited website by Tor users is Facebook, which opened its doors to Tor back in 2014 when it launched an .onion address. At the time, Facebooks senior engineer,Alec Muffet, stated:

The idea is that the Facebook onion address connects you to Facebooks Core WWW Infrastructure check the URL again, youll see what we did there and it reflects one benefit of accessing Facebook this way: that it provides end-to-end communication, from your browser directly into a Facebook datacentre.

Facebook had barred Tor users from accessing its website in the past, citing security concerns. At the time, it claimed that the network could be used to attack its servers. Now, according to reports, as many as one million people use Facebook via the Tor browser. This may be an insignificant amount for Facebook, but it is a major figure for Tor.

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Tor Co-Founder: There Is No Dark Web The Merkle - The Merkle

Last updated: 01 August 2017

Whether you're just worried about Facebook settings or you want to hide all your online movements, you need a privacy audit.

In an age of mandatory data retentionit's crucial to understand your privacy settings. What are you really sharing and with whom? And how do you hide what you want to hide online? Review the online services you use and work out how much of your personal information is getting out into the online world.

In this article:

So just how worried are you about online privacy? You need some level of concern because not everyone can be trusted online. Young people may not appreciate that what goes online stays online, and older people may have concerns about exposing themselves on the web.

To help guide you, we've created an easy ready reckoner for finding your paranoia level and then understanding what you could be sharing and how to protect yourself whether you're the next Snowden or just a little wary.

The thing to understand with any platform or service is that if it's free, your personal data is the currency. That goes for Facebook, Gmail and other free email services, Google and all its tentacles that follow you from a search all around the web, free public Wi-Fi, the list could go on.

The first place to start is Facebook, but the platform itself will always have dibs on your personal details. It's just the price of doing business with the social media giant. The only way around it is to avoid using it altogether or severely limit how much personal information you put into your profile, such as your school, workplace and country of residence.

If you can't kick the habit altogether, it might be worth reviewing your privacy settings. Log in and go to Settings > Privacy. Here you can restrict who sees your posts, who can contact you for a friend request and who can look up your profile. If you're worried about securing your login, under Security and Login choose two-factor authentication such as password and code, alerts for unrecognised logins and encrypted email notifications.

If you're prone to turning to 140 characters to express yourself, you might want to check your Twitter, particularly given the social media platform's changes to privacy settings. What a surprise, it's taking more of your information in the name of 'personalised' content (read: advertising and marketing using your social life as raw material) and data collection is automatically opted-in on your behalf.

Log in to Twitter, then go to Settings and privacy, then Privacy and safety. Here you can review how much of your personal details are revealed, such as your location, and set up tweet protection so you can approve who sees your tweets. To see how Twitter personalises content and collects and shares your data, go to Personalization and Data. This will tell you what personal information will be used to show you ads and even tap into the apps you have on your mobile device for targeting content.

Paranoia rating: X

If you're conducting a lot of your life online, a password manager will help securely store your passwords and potentially prevent accounts with simple passwords from being hacked. Simple passwords such as your child's name are easy to create and easy to remember, but they can leave you vulnerable to hacking. Our password manager reviews can help you find a program that will create unique, complex passwords that are securely stored so you don't have to remember or worse, write down all these passwords.

If you use Google to search the web a lot and you have one or more Google accounts such as Gmail, you're potentially gifting the search giant a lot of your private details. One way to see how much you've exposed is to review your footprint in Google MyActivity. Click on the Activity Controls tab to review your activity and see how your personal information is handled.

Paranoia rating: XX

If you think that governments around the world are giving themselves a little too much licence to access your personal movements online, it could be time to use a VPN. Virtual private networks (VPNs) help shield your web browsing, identity and location, creating a secure 'digital tunnel' between you and your online destinations. A VPN can also protect you from online identity theft while using a public Wi-Fi connection and is essential if you're doing any kind of shopping, financial or other sensitive transaction on public internet.

Not sure where to start? Our VPN reviewswill show you which services we recommend when it comes to protecting your privacy online.

A messaging app with good security is another way to protect private conversations via the net. Depending on the level of privacy you're looking for, you may want to go with a dedicated security-focused app such as Wickr, Confide or Tunnel, or perhaps one of the more popular apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and iOS Messages.

Paranoia rating: XXX

You might be plotting espionage, or you might just want to prevent government and business, as much as possible, from prying into your life online. If you fit this description, then there are a few things you won't want to go online without.

Your privacy toolkit won't be complete without email encryption. Emails aren't usually encrypted, which means that messages and attachments in your inbox and in transit can potentially be read. Luckily there are free email encryption programs that you can use without too much trouble that will protect your messages from prying eyes. Mailvelope works with Chrome and Firefox as a plugin and can work with Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Outlook.com.

Next up in your privacy toolkit will be Tor and the Tor browser. Tor, which is short for The Onion Router, is a network of secure computers provided by individuals to help others stay secure online. It's often used by dissidents, journalists, whistleblowers and activists in countries with hostile governments to hide their activity and communications online. Tor hides the 'header' or metadata that can reveal details such as the source, destination, size and timing of web traffic. There are mobile versions for Android, Orbot, and Onion Browser for iOS. If you need to send large files securely, the Onionshare uses the Tor network for anonymity.

If you would rather leave no trace of your web activity on the computer you're using, you can go one step further with Tails. It's a secure operating system that can run from a USB drive, storage cards or DVD that encrypts all of your files, emails and instant messaging traffic using the Tor network and can just plug in and then be removed after use.

Paranoia rating: XXXX

If after all of these measures you still think your privacy isn't fully protected, you might want to consult a higher source by reading The Art of Invisibility: The World's Most Famous Hacker Teaches You How to Be Safe in the Age of Big Brother and Big Data, by Kevin D. Mitnick. He was once a hacker, but has been a long-time security consultant and public speaker on issues of security.

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Online privacy protection - Choice - CHOICE

Short Bytes: Talking at the DEF CON convention in Las Vegas, the TOR Project co-founder Roger Dingledine said that the dark web doesnt exist and its just a few web pages. He added that media has wrongly labeled it as a heaven for illegal activities. Also, only 3% of TOR users connect to a hidden .onion website.

At the DEF CON convention in Las Vegas, on Friday, Roger Dingledine, one of the three TOR Project founders, said that there are tons of misconceptions about the same. According to The Register,Dingledine bashed the journalists for giving a bad name to the TOR network by calling it a heaven for pedophiles and terrorists.

There is basically no dark web. It doesnt exist. Its only a very few webpages, he told.

If youre interested in numbers, only 3% of TOR users connect to a hidden .onion website, said Dingledine. This means that majority of users are using it for simply analyzing their activities on the indexed web. They are, most probably, using it for stopping the website owners from tracking them.

According to his data, surprisingly, Facebook is the most popular website visited by TOR users. Today, more than a million people visit Facebook using TOR browser, thanks to the networks hidden service launched in 2014.

Dingledine also made attempts to calm down those who feared that different intelligence agencies have already cracked TOR and compromised the integrity. Intelligence agencies didnt need to set up their own stepping-stone nodes he said, since they could if they wanted to just monitor those who did run them, as reported by The Register.

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There Is Basically No Dark Web. It's Only A Few Webpages TOR Co-founder - Fossbytes

Congress recently voted to overturn a wide-ranging set of internet privacy laws passed by the Federal Communications Commission in October of last year. And since President Trump has signed the bill into law earlier this year, browsing the internet as we know it even from the comfort of our own homes has become a major liability for those who care about the value of their personal information.

In essence, as of Monday April 3, 2017, our internet service providers (ISPs) now have a free pass to decide what theyll do with our most sensitive data, such as online browsing habits, app usage, location information, vital data like addresses, phone numbers, and even Social Security numbers. Additionally, the law dictates that ISPs are now free to sell their customers information without their consent, either to marketers and marketing agencies, financial firms, or other companies at their discretion.

To be frank, browsing the web has never been more unsafe at any time in history than it is now. But luckily, for those smart enough to protect themselves and their families, theres a silver lining to all of this insanity: Tor Browser.

Unlike popular web browsers such as Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc., using Tor browser allows you to completely protect your online activity, data, and vital information by bouncing communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world. What that means, in other words, is that Tor browser protects your online identity by preventing people (i.e., your snoopy ISP) from watching your internet connection, logging what websites you visit, registering your location data, and more. Tor even lets you visit websites that have been blocked, according to its developers.

Best of all, you can now download Tor browser for free on your Mac or Windows PC; follow the steps below to download Tor on your Mac.

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How to Install Tor Browser for Mac and Protect Your Online Activity - iDrop News

SAFACT has reportedly issued ISPs with a request to block numerous piracy sites, sparking fears that certain domains will be blocked in South Africa.

The sites are thought to be torrent indexers, which are popular among online pirates for downloading media and software.

Internet censorship is common in various countries across the world, and usually consists of ISPs blocking access to specific domains or certain types of traffic.

The Great Firewall of China prevents Chinese citizens from accessing the unrestricted Internet, even disrupting many VPN services.

The UK also has a form of Internet censorship, with many major ISPs blocking websites linked to gambling, pornography, and piracy.

It is relatively easy to circumvent an ISP blocking access to certain domains, however, as detailed below.

There are many ways ISPs can block Internet traffic, with one of the most simple methods the blocking of domains at the DNS level.

This is simple to circumvent and requires users to change their clients preferred DNS server.

If you are using a Windows PC, you can do this by following the steps below.

This bypasses the ISPs filtered DNS and uses a service called Google Public DNS.

Another option is to use a proxy website or browser extension to route web traffic through a different domain, circumventing your ISPs domain name blocking.

Proxy websites redirect traffic through their own domain, allowing users to access any site as long as the proxy website is not blocked by the ISP.

If the above is not sufficient and you require greater anonymity online, the Tor network may be the next step.

Tor is a network of distributed relays around the world through which your traffic is routed.

This prevents your connection and online activity from being easily tracked, as it is routed through relays which anonymise web traffic.

It should be noted that operators of exit nodes on the Tor network could eavesdrop on unencrypted communications over the network, though.

Users can download the Tor Browser from the the Tor Project page.

While the Tor network is great for anonymity and general Internet activity, it increases latency and your maximum download speed may degrade if the relays are on slow connections.

It is therefore not suitable for file sharing, and by default, your non-web traffic will not be routed through Tor.

The Tor browser functions like a normal web browser and can be used to access any website on the Internet, including .onion websites on the dark web.

If your ISP is still able to block traffic to certain sites using methods like packet filtering you may have to invest in a VPN service.

A VPN (Virtual Private Network) allows you to browse and access the Internet without your ISP examining your traffic.

An encrypted connection between your computer and the VPN prevents your ISP from accessing data traffic which your VPN sends on your behalf.

While certain services have a free trial offer, VPNs usually require a subscription fee. This gives youmore control over your online security.

The latest Opera browser features a built-in VPN, which can be turned on and off. VPN extensions for Chrome and Firefox are also an option for users.

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How to get around an ISP blocking a website - MyBroadband

MDMA, aka ecstasy, aka molly, is popular on dark web drug marketplaces.

Noel Celis/AFP/Getty Images

Last Thursday, the Justice Department announced that it had worked with European authorities to shutter two of the largest destinations on the dark web to buy and sell illegal drugs, AlphaBay and Hansa.

The shutdown followed reports from earlier in the month that AlphaBay, the larger of the two, had mysteriously stopped working, causing users to flock to Hansa. But it turns out that Hansa had been taken over by the Dutch national police, who were collecting information on people using the site to traffic drugs.

European and American law enforcement collaborated to quietly arrest AlphaBays alleged founder Alexandre Cazes in Thailand on July 5. The 25-year-old Cazes later committed suicide in a Thai jail, according to the New York Times.

These dark web drug marketplaces are accessed using a service called Tor, which allows users to browse the internet anonymously. With Tor, you can circumvent law enforcement surveillance as well as internet censorship filters, which are often installed by governments or companies to restrict where people go online. Tor also allows for the creation of anonymously hosted websites or servers that can only be accessed via the Tor Browser. AlphaBay and Hansa were both hosted anonymously on Tor.

Though AlphaBay, Hansa, and, most famously, Silk Road depended on Tor to run their illegal operations, the Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains the anonymous browser and hosting service, says that only 2 percent of Tor traffic has to do with anonymously hosted websites. The vast majority of Tor traffic is used for browsing the web anonymously. More than 1.5 million people use Tor every day, according to a spokesperson.

The U.S. government has a rather complicated relationship with Tor. On the one hand, documents revealed by Edward Snowden revealed how the National Security Agency had been trying to break Tor for years, searching for security vulnerabilities in browsers that would allow law enforcement to crack the online anonymity service. The Department of Defense has also invested in trying to crack Tor. During the 2016 trial of one of the administrators of Silk Road 2.0, another shuttered dark web drug-trafficking site, it was revealed that DoD hired researchers from Carnegie Mellon University to try to break Tors encryption in 2014.

Yet Tor also wouldnt exist without the U.S. governmentit was originally built as a project out of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. The State Department continues to fund Tor (at least someone has told Rex Tillerson about it, presumably) because internet users around the world rely on the anonymity tool to access information and communicate safely online, particularly in countries where the internet is heavily monitored or censored by the government, like in China with its national firewall, or in Thailand, where its illegal to criticize the royal family online.

Cazes, the AlphaBay ring leader, was caught thanks to investigative work, not a break in Tors encryption. Cazes had sent password recovery emails to his email address, which investigators used to find his LinkedIn profile and other identifiers. (And no, the FBI did not dig up an email from Cazes asking to join his professional network on LinkedIn. According to The Verge, Cazes used the same address on a French technology troubleshooting website, which listed his full name, leading investigators to find a LinkedIn profile where he boasted cryptography and web hosting skills, as well as involvement in a drug front.)

And thats good news for the vast majority of Tor users who arent interested in scoring molly. In 2015, a report from the U.N. declared that anonymity tools provide the privacy and security necessary for the exercise of the right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital age."

Anonymity tools, like so many technologies, have both good and bad applications. And in the same way cellphones arent evil just because some people use them to make drug deals, its important to not malign anonymity tools just because some people use them to sell drugs, too. If the U.S. government is ever successful in finding a way to disable Tors encryption to find criminals, it could put hundreds of thousands of people who depend on Tor at risk, too.

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Don't blame online anonymity for dark web drug deals. - Slate Magazine (blog)