[HN Gopher] Twitter's new Tor onion service
___________________________________________________________________
Twitter's new Tor onion service
Author : mooreds
Score : 130 points
Date : 2022-03-08 20:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| mulmen wrote:
| Ok but I assume the user-hostile dark patterns are still present?
| So I can't scroll past more than a few tweets without a full page
| popover driving me to sign up?
|
| I have no interest in ever "tweeting". I do not need an account
| to read tweets from a link sent to me. At this point I refuse to
| log in or comply with the wishes of Twitter PMs just on
| principle.
|
| If the onion site does not feature these dark patterns then this
| will actually drive me to use Twitter _more_ , and will actually
| take some of my usage off the web and onto tor.
| dillondoyle wrote:
| And IIRC you need a cell phone to get an account. At least it
| made me when I signed up for one to read the news. Maybe it was
| so dark I missed how to skip.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Yes even if you skip they'll just flag your account for bot
| like activity and require a phone number to unlock. Happened
| to me first time I replied to Elon Musk, have to hand it to
| them, definitely something a bot would do.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| Instead of the terrible Twitter website, have you considered
| Nitter[0] with an extension like Privacy Redirect[1] (or on
| mobile, an app like UntrackMe[3])? No login prompt, no dark
| patterns, no JavaScript
|
| [0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter [1]
| https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-redirect [2]
| https://f-droid.org/packages/app.fedilab.nitterizeme/
| mulmen wrote:
| I don't _use_ Twitter. Someone texts me a link and I tap it,
| then we discuss. Is there some way to make mobile Safari
| automatically parse Twitter links and redirect?
|
| Twitter is extremely low-value to me. Any additional effort
| and I will just do something else with my time.
| amai wrote:
| Using Tor is illegal in China. In Russia the situation is
| similar:
|
| "Since December 1st, some Internet providers in Russia have
| started to block access to Tor."
|
| https://blog.torproject.org/tor-censorship-in-russia/
|
| So I'm not sure if Twitters Tor support helps a lot.
| carlosdp wrote:
| Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can still
| use a non-blocked Tor Bridge to connect to the network in this
| scenario.
| [deleted]
| stingraycharles wrote:
| Could someone elaborate on what potential threat is addressed
| here for the users? As far as I understand, a hidden service's
| main purpose is to protect the privacy of the domain operator (in
| this case, Twitter).
|
| For a user, however, just the act of connecting through Tor will
| protect their privacy (to a debatable degree). At the very least,
| it will circumvent any blocks put in place by their ISP and/or
| upstream.
|
| What's the advantage of a hidden service then?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Another reason I can think of is that as more and more
| "legitimate" traffic moves onto Tor internal (no exit nodes) it
| becomes increasingly non-viable for nation states to execute a
| blanket ban on Tor traffic as it would be too disruptive to
| people and the economy.
| xxpor wrote:
| Perhaps an ignorant question, but don't hidden services not
| need exit nodes? It'd make using Twitter a lot faster, I'd
| assume?
| bragr wrote:
| Traffic to hidden services stays within the tor network so
| you don't need exit nodes. However it isn't necessarily
| faster. As I understand it, with a typical hidden service,
| the hidden service nominates certain nodes for clients to use
| to make contact with it and the client and the service build
| tor circuits to those nodes thereby preserving the privacy of
| both clients and servers but you end up with longer circuits
| than those to exit nodes, and you are limited by the slowest
| node in that chain. There is a mode for hidden services where
| you don't care about staying hidden (say you are twitter or
| the NYT running a service and everyone already knows who owns
| the site and where the datacenters are) where, as I
| understand it, you allow clients to build circuits directly
| to you which preserves client privacy but not server. This is
| more performant than a normal hidden service but I wouldn't
| call it fast.
| zrm wrote:
| A major practical advantage is that Tor exit nodes regularly
| have their IP addresses marked as abusive and then you have to
| do a million captchas to sign in, and the onion service doesn't
| do that.
| esnard wrote:
| Alec Muffet, who helped Twitter on this, replied to your
| question on his blog: Why offer an Onion Address rather than
| just encourage browsing-over-Tor? [0]
|
| [0] https://alecmuffett.com/article/16007
| anonporridge wrote:
| > Using onion services mitigates attacks that can be executed
| by possibly-malicious "Tor Exit Nodes" -- which, though rare,
| are not nonexistent.
| amelius wrote:
| Would it make sense to be able to select your Tor exit
| node, in this case from a bunch offered by Twitter?
| anonporridge wrote:
| Then you'd have to trust these Twitter run exit nodes to
| not attack your traffic towards non twitter sites.
| amelius wrote:
| Exit nodes run by Twitter sounds less scary than exit
| nodes run by random folks.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Another benefit is that exit nodes tend to be saturated with
| traffic from folks using them to transit traffic onto the
| clearnet. As such, latency and throughput through these exit
| nodes is going to be pretty bad. Using Tor to directly view
| Twitter means that you aren't bottlenecked around an exit node
| to reach Twitter.
| celticninja wrote:
| IIRC With an onion site you don't need an exit node to visit
| the site.
|
| So all traffic stays within TOR.
| mritzmann wrote:
| This. Result: The website (here Twitter) load faster, because
| Exit nodes are sometimes not that fast.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Good. Now please allow me to lurk more easily without an account.
| [deleted]
| btdmaster wrote:
| twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion
| does not work due to CORS. (For me, it doesn't matter much since
| Twitter depends on JavaScript and Nitter does not.)
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Big fan of Nitter. Switched to it when Twitter killed off non-
| javascript last year, and I rewrite all Twitter links in it
| when resharing with others. Works great in w3m, or in NoScript
| without need to whitelist a social media tracker.
| largbae wrote:
| Would it be possible for one of you experienced NoScript'ers
| to write a set of tips and tricks? I have been using NoScript
| for about a month since someone mentioned it here, and it has
| been wonderful. I never imagined I could opt out of just the
| trackers and APM bloat so easily, and my phone battery life
| is improved dramatically too. But I bet there are more things
| like Nitter that I haven't yet discovered.
|
| Thanks!!
| capitainenemo wrote:
| I'm not sure what to focus on. On the desktop, I combine
| uMatrix+NoScript for better coverage of CSS, cookies and
| images across domains, while still having convenient one
| click whitelisting in NoScript. That's just a personal
| preference.
|
| Expand/collapse sections that default to collapsed.
| Particularly annoying if no one bothered to put fallback
| CSS in a noscript block. Using custom CSS style rules can
| help with this. Unfortunately Mozilla killed the vast
| majority of their extension ecosystem on the phone. One
| silly hack workaround I found was that their darkmode
| extension they did whitelist allows custom CSS rules that
| can be used to fix things like this. It isn't nearly as
| elegant as using Stylus on the desktop for this.
|
| Reader mode can help with broken sites. Disabling all CSS
| also a quick fix if you just want to read stuff. Almost
| like browsing with w3m. (View-Page Style-No Style) Dynamic
| image loading - regrettably despite HTML support for it,
| many sites use JS hacks and are probably pretty disinclined
| to support NoScript users. I've made custom fixes in
| violentmonkey for sites I care about on the desktop -
| mostly out of sheer cussedness. No solution on mobile that
| I know of apart from whitelisting.
|
| old.reddit.com - shame Mozilla killed the addon to
| autorewrite the urls.
| LinuxBender wrote:
| That's a good idea. Nitter proxies behind Tor onion service
| nodes.
| benmw333 wrote:
| Login to a service with Tor that will just kick you off if you
| hold views contra to corporate media.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| That is a little unfair. There is a lot of nonsense on Twitter
| that doesnt get banned.
| nerdponx wrote:
| And keep in mind that Twitter would much rather not have to
| censor anything. Content moderation, legal compliance, etc
| are cost centers.
|
| It's easy to get lost in the "evil corporate overlord" idea
| and forget that companies only ever commit evil because evil
| is sometimes profitable.
| nathias wrote:
| its the sense that gets you banned
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Why did you equate "contra to corporate media" with
| "nonsense"?
| [deleted]
| makerofspoons wrote:
| I wish this page elaborated on what "Additional domains used to
| enable parts of site functionality" means. What additional
| functionality is available when I use the different links?
| bragr wrote:
| Just poking at the two home pages (tor and not)
| twitterhbmit57bzbcjnujedrn7uk73geo4ackio4lxdj6t7w6f4zsid.onion
| is the equivalent of the abs.twimg.com CDN, so assets,
| javascript files, fonts, etc
|
| I don't immediately see what
| twitterhpgjerufcvrmzerg2novpipy42rk3anvb5b7np4zggm4rwaqd.onion
| is being use for though.
| nightpool wrote:
| I think they just mean CDN domains, asset domains, etc.
| markstos wrote:
| Right. For example, normally "twimg.com" is used for serving
| images and "t.co" is used for link shortening and engagement
| tracking.
|
| So they may need additional Tor domains to map the additional
| domains they normally use.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| Twitter was already available over Tor, via
| https://www.twitter.com - Creating an onion service didn't make
| it any more available.
| tanduv wrote:
| One of the devs working on this already answered -
| https://alecmuffett.com/article/16007
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| I get the arguments he's listed. But to be honest, and this
| may just be me being pessimistic, I suspect the real reason
| is that it's just a cool thing for an interested dev to want
| to set up, and the list of reasons at that URL is really just
| a list of excuses.
| [deleted]
| hnarn wrote:
| The entire Internet is available via Tor but only via exit
| nodes, saying that it "doesn't make it any more available" to
| offer it directly within Tor shows a fundamental lack of
| understanding of how Tor works.
|
| If you can access a service, any service, completely within Tor
| without having to exit to the Internet, this significantly
| improves your anonymity[1] since you no longer have to go
| through an exit node, and as such the amount of nodes you can
| "exit" from increases substantially.
|
| [1]: That is, the anonymity that Tor already provides.
| Obviously signing up for Twitter under your real name with your
| phone number will compromise your anonymity regardless, but
| that is not the problem that Tor solves.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I'm right, and that I understand how Tor
| works.
|
| The existence of the Twitter onion service does not help a
| single person access Twitter that couldn't already access it
| anonymously without the onion service just by using Tor
| normally.
| MayeulC wrote:
| An exit node (or multiple ones) could block twitter.
|
| Exit nodes are rarer than other nodes, as they're difficult
| to host. That limits the bandwidth.
|
| An onion adress doesn't rely on DNS at all.
|
| I think this should provide better bandwidth, availability,
| and anonimity.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Also, if I understand correctly, exit nodes have vectors
| for attacking your security that are eliminated by an
| onion address.
| superkuh wrote:
| I can't imagine many of the people accessing twitter over Tor are
| going to be okay with running random executable code to be able
| to read text. But maybe in this context they're assuming people
| will be using Tor that don't care about privacy and only care
| about access.
| boredumb wrote:
| Finally a reliable way to read opinions from ill informed and
| over socialized authoritarians at 100KB/sec.
| YaBomm wrote:
| wolverine876 wrote:
| I saw a diagram of traffic to an .onion domain, I think in a Tor
| Project browser, and it showed the traffic going through ~3 Tor
| relays, _then ~3 'regular' Internet relays_, then perhaps
| something else, then the .onion host.
|
| Why the 'regular' Internet relays? It wasn't a hijack of some
| sort, this diagram was from the Tor Project. It wasn't an
| exception AFAICT, I saw it for multiple .onion hosts.
|
| I assume the traffic is encrypted over the Internet relays, but
| it seems to add a bunch of potential vectors of attack, not to
| mention potential performance issues.
|
| EDIT: 'clear' -> 'regular'
| sp332 wrote:
| Tor hidden servers have changed recently so this may be a bit
| out of date, but the client (at the Twitter user end) has to
| choose all the relays between itself and the endpoint. The
| server (Twitter) is also hidden here, so the client cannot make
| a path all the way to it, the way it could for a normal
| website. So Twitter publishes the address of a trusted relay
| instead. The client makes a path to the relay, and the relay
| forwards the request on to the hidden server.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thank you. Why do some relays need to be public Internet
| hosts (if I understood correctly what I saw) instead of using
| all Tor hosts as relays? Sorry if the answer is somehow
| implicit in what you already posted.
| sp332 wrote:
| https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/forwarding-tor-hidden-
| services...
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Thanks for all your help and I understand if I've
| exhausted the efforts of free HN technical help!
|
| I read the link and while I learned more about Tor, the
| article seems to describe how to secure Tor traffic that
| is forwarded to regular Internet hosts, for example if
| someone using a Tor client visited ycombinator.com. My
| question is, if you use a Tor client to visit twitterhpgj
| erufcvrmzerg2novpipy42rk3anvb5b7np4zggm4rwaqd.onion, why
| is part of the route through regular Internet hosts
| (afaict) and what are the implications of that? The
| article shows what I am describing in this screenshot;
| the blacked out parts next to "Portugal", "Germany", and
| "United States" are IP addresses:
|
| https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/forwarding-tor-hidden-
| services...
|
| (Also, my original post had it backward: the traffic goes
| through regular Internet hosts and then through Tor
| relays, not vice versa)
|
| Again, maybe I am just missing the implications of what
| you are saying.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| Isn't determining the full path in Tor for routing to it's
| .onion sort of defeating the purpose? Can the client request
| this level of specificity?
| sp332 wrote:
| Only the trusted relay in the middle knows that half of the
| path. Sorry if that wasn't clear. And again, this was a
| hack on the original protocol that had some security
| issues. The implementation of hidden servers was recently
| updated and I don't know exactly what changed.
| Bombthecat wrote:
| But... Cant you noch the relay?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| EDIT (too late to edit parent):
|
| This screenshot, from an article linked below, shows what I'm
| talking about. The blacked out parts next to "Portugal",
| "Germany", and "United States" cover publicly routable IP
| addresses (afaik):
|
| https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/forwarding-tor-hidden-services...
|
| Also, note that I had it backward in the parent: The traffic
| first goes through publicly routable IPs, then through Tor
| relays.
| I_Byte wrote:
| I think I may be able to help sort out the confusing bits. I
| know a lot about Tor so if you have any further questions
| feel free to ask. Sp332's comment is a good explanation so I
| will simply expand upon it. Also, if I misunderstood your
| question let me know.
|
| Tor works by ensuring that there is three Tor relays between
| the Tor client (the software that connects to the Tor
| network) and the destination the Tor client is connecting to.
|
| However, what happens when you want to establish a connection
| between two hosts who are both using Tor through the Tor
| network? Well, in that case both Tor programs establish a
| path through three Tor relays and link the last Tor relays in
| each of their separate chains together (if you are interested
| in learning about how each Tor program knows the others end
| point look up "Tor hidden service directory"). Now with both
| ends of their Tor relay chains linked, both hosts can
| communicate with each other securely and anonymously over the
| Tor network. (For example: you are using Tor browser to
| connect to a hidden service. Both Tor browser and the hidden
| service make a chain of three Tor relays each and connect the
| chains together through the last node of each chain. The Tor
| browser only knows the relays that it uses for its chain +
| the end of the hidden services chain. The hidden service only
| knows the relays in its chain + the last relay in your chain.
| Thus keeping you both anonymous.)
|
| I hope this helps!
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| The screenshot shows the traffic going through 3 Tor relays
| (which your browser knows the public IP addresses of, since
| it created that circuit in the first place) followed by three
| more Tor relays (which it _doesn 't_ know the public IP
| addresses of, since that circuit was created by the hidden
| service), followed by a final hop to the hidden service.
| edm0nd wrote:
| .onion traffic never leaves the Tor network and stays inside.
|
| Clear internet is for when someone is using tor and goes to a
| clearnet site like blah.com. This is what exit relays are for.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| That is what I believed but what I saw seemed to conflict:
| Install the Tor Project browser, connect to an .onion host,
| then click on the icon that shows the route. It appears to
| show the route goes through non-Tor hosts (I don't call them
| 'clearnet' because I expect the data and some metadata is
| encrypted).
|
| EDIT: See this screenshot from an article elsewhere in this
| discussion. The blacked out bits next to "Portugal",
| "Germany", and "United States" are publicly routable IP
| addresses (IIRC):
|
| https://www.jamieweb.net/blog/forwarding-tor-hidden-
| services...
| yuliyp wrote:
| This is normal: your computer picks the set of 3 relays you
| want to use, hence it knows their IP addresses. The 3
| relays from there to the hidden service are _not_ known to
| your computer though, so those are just listed as "relay"
| aosaigh wrote:
| Twitter is almost useless now unless you login with an account
| (that requires a phone number). I'm not sure who the subset of
| Tor users are who are comfortable logging into a service such as
| Twitter?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| On desktop I disable all cookies from twitter and it allows me
| to browse freely.
| azangru wrote:
| It used to do the same for me in the incognito mode on
| Chrome. Not anymore :-(
| probotect0r wrote:
| It doesn't require a phone number. Created an account the other
| day with only email.
| Aissen wrote:
| Yup, they usually lock the account once you start using it,
| possibly using some kind of pattern detection.
| bierjunge wrote:
| Tried it two times in last six months. Once via the Android
| app and the second time on the website on my laptop. Both
| accounts were blocked after less than 15 minutes without
| even doing anything (except following a few accounts which
| Twitter suggested based on my interests... [0]). Both times
| they wanted a phone number to unlock.
|
| I tried to contact the support, but they never responded.
|
| [0] different accounts, based on different interests
| bierjunge wrote:
| It's getting even better. I just logged into one of the
| suspended accounts. Pretty much everything is locked, but
| without any information about the suspension. It's pretty
| much "Oops, something went wrong. Please try again
| later." on everything.
|
| Ok, let's try it with the "Twitter privacy policy
| inquiries" form (while logged in). Nope, can't submit
| anything, because of the suspension. So why not have some
| fun? Just sent a GDPR request via the "suspension appeal"
| form. Why? For the lulz and to have some legal leverage.
|
| Not even five minutes passed and I got a email. My
| account is not suspended anymore... WTF twitter?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| And there my account sits, a year later. I can't close it
| because they won't let me do that without adding a number,
| but I'm not going to add it.
| danuker wrote:
| > possibly using some kind of pattern detection.
|
| The pattern of "not having provided a phone number"
| perhaps?
| Aissen wrote:
| I wanted to provide them the benefit of the doubt.
| Probably.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Whom do you trust your identity with more? Twitter or the
| regime you're under?
|
| As much as I despise Twitter, I'd much rather that they
| exclusively know my identity than both they and the regime.
| This isn't to say that I agree with Twitter requiring phone
| numbers.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| Twitter is not a "leftist organization". Contrary to the
| belief of the somewhat unhinged, there's no conservative-
| hating conspiracy of tech giants, which are on the whole
| not particularly left-leaning where it counts. There are
| absolutely conservatives on Twitter; there have always been
| and it remains that way now.
| hecatoncheires wrote:
| Twitter literally banned the sitting President of the
| United States, a Republican. Other Republicans like
| Marjorie Taylor Greene have had their accounts banned,
| while this has never happened to a Democrat. People were
| banned for questioning COVID (e.g. the lab leak
| hypothesis), banned for questioning the 2020 Presidential
| election's integrity (yet nobody was banned for
| speculating on Russian interference and calling Trump
| illegitimate in 2016), banned for misgendering or
| deadnaming transgenders. Conveniently all the wrongthink
| that fall squarely in opposition to progressive ideology.
|
| I don't think anyone believes there's a secret
| conspiracy, it's more that the type of people who work in
| programming, and particularly for a Bay Area company like
| Twitter, tend to be very progressive. It's the same
| miasma that clouds the mainstream media, academia, and
| now most corporate PR.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| beardog wrote:
| Some people use Tor to bypass censorship or mask their traffic
| metadata from a local adversary
| Traster wrote:
| I think the point is to evade censorship in Russia, No?
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Yes, I'm seeing a relaxing of the general exclusion and
| abusive stance towards Tor users.
|
| But that gives me a weird feeling to be honest.
|
| We need to be in an international military crisis in order
| that basic values of privacy prevail at home?
|
| That does not speak well of our quiescent "western values"
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Well, sure.
|
| If most Tor traffic to your service is abuse where it may
| be worthwhile to block it completely, then a catastrophic
| event that gets more honest people using Tor may make it
| worthwhile to unblock it.
| adventured wrote:
| > We need to be in an international military crisis in
| order that basic values of privacy prevail at home? ...
| That does not speak well of our quiescent "western values"
|
| It also doesn't speak ill of those values, it says nothing
| about the values. You're conflating two separate matters:
| the values, and the effort required to hold/protect them.
|
| Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against
| politicians, malevolent actors generally, that lust after
| increased power (for themselves and frequently the state as
| well).
|
| It makes sense that that would be a process of erosion and
| (hopefully) rejuvination across years, decades,
| generations, centuries - as the counter forces battle. If
| you're really fortunate you live in a system that makes it
| a lot more difficult for the power-seeking politicians to
| trample on your rights.
|
| Just because something of value requires effort to keep or
| maintain, that doesn't debase its value or otherwise speak
| to how great or how little the value is. Very valuable
| things often require an enormous investment to acquire and
| keep over time. At all times entropy is trying to destroy
| well ordered systems (eg democratic, constitutional,
| rights-protecting governments), it takes a huge amount of
| resources just to forestall that and you can never stop
| investing into it for long.
|
| It also takes an enormous investment of resources to
| maintain authoritarian, anti-rights systems. They can never
| stop using force to oppress the population, they have to
| constantly crush the spirit of the population. They have to
| divert human potential on a persistent basis toward
| destruction, oppression, violent actions against the
| citizenship, actions inspiring fear/terror/dread. They can
| never stop spewing propaganda meant to keep the population
| in check, docile, in fear, etc.
|
| That systems require active effort and mental attention to
| maintain, tells you very little about whether they're good
| or bad, the same goes for values a person holds (which also
| require effort to maintain), or the values a culture of
| people broadly holds.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Thanks for a thoughtful reply adventured. As I said, it
| gives me an uneasy/weird feeling, which is to say I
| haven't quite unpacked it myself yet. Your response is
| helping me.
|
| > It also doesn't speak ill of those values
|
| Well actually it does, at least in that it highlights
| them as inconsistent. Clearly my issue is that values
| prone to change according to circumstance are weaker, as
| generally one holds consistent values higher than fickle
| ones. However, your further points are interesting and
| deserve thought.
|
| > You're conflating two separate matters, the values, and
| the effort required to hold/protect them.
|
| Perhaps in a short, pithy comment I'm not taking time to
| distinguish the values (which I love and live by, and
| believe most of my countrymen uphold) and the laziness by
| which some fail to consistently and robustly stand up for
| them.
|
| > Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain
| against politicians, malevolent actors generally
|
| Absolutely, and would you agree that we've slipped
| dreadfully in that duty in recent years?
|
| > Just because something of value requires effort to keep
| or maintain, that doesn't debase its value or otherwise
| speak or how great or how little the value is.
|
| I am glad you think that, and we agree. I am not sure if
| you thought I said otherwise?
|
| > Very valuable things often require an enormous
| investment to acquire and keep over time.
|
| Like previous wars in which my family have fought at
| great cost.
|
| > At all times entropy is trying to destroy well ordered
| systems
|
| No. Sorry. That's too simplistic a take. I'm not talking
| about the constant gardening required to maintain
| structures of value, I am alluding to the malevolent
| domestic forces who would sell our hard won freedom,
| democracy and liberal values down the swanny for their
| own aggrandisement and profit when it suits them, and
| sing a different song when virtue signalling calls.
|
| Let me try to be clearer what I am attacking here. It is
| sloppy and selective values. It is a laziness that lies
| somewhere between "sworn enemies unite against a common
| foe", and a prejudiced framing effect.
|
| We're all very happy to cheer on Tor, VPNs or other
| instruments that circumvent tyranny, so long as it's not
| _our_ tyranny. All of us have benefited hugely from the
| freedoms immanent therein. We built these tools (US
| Navy), and the internet itself (DARPA), in pursuit of
| spreading the same values that we no longer have the
| stomach to robustly defend here.
|
| Yet when a tyrant goes crazy in Overthereistan we're all
| sweetness and light and our digital "doors are always
| open for freedom". Those double standards are not a good
| look.
|
| I need more time to think about it, but maybe what irks
| me here is simple hypocrisy.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| > Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain
| against politicians, malevolent actors generally
|
| Politicians do not in general work to abolish democracy.
| The vast majority, in democratic countries, accepts and
| supports it. To just label them "malevolent actors"
| without even feeling the need to explain it is nihilistic
| cynicism: if all you ever do is scream at the top of your
| lung that someone is a corrupt scumbag, they will either
| adapt and become someone like that or quit.
| Shish2k wrote:
| My site blocks tor nodes not because I hate privacy, but
| because the overwhelming majority of spammy / abusive
| content was posted over the tor network, and blocking tor
| improved the signal:noise ratio better than the best anti-
| spam tools :/
| webmaven wrote:
| _> We need to be in an international military crisis in
| order that basic values of privacy prevail at home?_
|
| Pretty much, yes. The US benefitted hugely from defining
| itself in opposition to the Soviet bloc during the Cold
| War. It's a major countervailing force to growing to
| resemble your opponent.
|
| Arguably, the US hasn't really figured out how to
| effectively define itself in opposition to China, given how
| liberally China has been copying parts of the US economic
| playbook (ie. "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics"),
| which itself is a trick the Soviets never managed.
| cronix wrote:
| Use nitter.net to view twitter. Just
| http://nitter.net/username. It barely uses javascript (except
| if you want to watch video), no ads, no popups, no login, no
| "trending" section. Just the content of the person you're
| trying to read content from. All twitter links are replaced
| with nitter links, so navigation isn't an issue. Even if I had
| a Twitter account I'd use Nitter to browse. It's a lighter
| experience with no extra crap.
| shosca wrote:
| You can also use https://github.com/SimonBrazell/privacy-
| redirect to auto redirect from twitter to nitter
| amatecha wrote:
| Oooh this is great, thank you. I've been wanting to set up
| something like this for quite a while and haven't really
| spent the time to figure out how I'd do it. Glad to have an
| option just land on my screen like this! Cheers :)
|
| Also just realized there are one or two other services they
| could redirect (e.g. Medium -> scribe.rip). Will see if
| it's feasible for them to easily add...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I imagine Twitter isn't too happy about this.
| mouzogu wrote:
| thanks, i really like this. i've been using the ublock zapper
| to get around twitters obnoxious sign up wall.
|
| i feel like websites like this, and archive.ph are a sign of
| the future web. very little or now javascript, very light and
| fast - it inspires me to want to build something again.
| cgb223 wrote:
| How do I set up uBlock to get around the sign in wall?
|
| Or is zapper a separate add on?
| Akronymus wrote:
| For me, it just completely breaks scrolling on twitter.com.
|
| Guess I am gonna go for nitter in the future.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That said, hard to feel like it's the future of the web
| when it's just wrappers around the services that people are
| actually using.
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| How to make this work with private accounts of people you
| follow? Is there a way to "log into Nitter"?
| Whateverest wrote:
| I am not a twitter user, but I guess the focus is on
| circumventing censorship rather than privacy.
| [deleted]
| edgyquant wrote:
| I don't see how those are exclusive? You need privacy to
| circumvent censorship
| notatoad wrote:
| imagine you're living in a country that's currently
| blocking twitter, but somebody is posting essential
| information on twitter that you need to read.
|
| twitter on Tor circumvents that censorship. giving twitter
| your phone number is irrelevant to that.
| pjerem wrote:
| > but somebody is posting essential information on
| twitter
|
| Tell that somebody that websites exists.
| sodality2 wrote:
| Which have terrible discovery compared to social media.
| Make a website about a hobby and you're unlikely to get
| many views. Post it on social media and you'll get way
| more
| pjerem wrote:
| Ok. But here someone is going to use Tor to reach
| "essential" information on Twitter.
|
| I don't think there is so essential information on
| Twitter that anyone would take the hassle to read it
| through Tor.
| roywiggins wrote:
| A surprising amount of timely information from public
| institutions (everything from road conditions to "it's
| not a real nuclear attack[0]") is often _much_ more
| accessible via Twitter than anywhere else.
|
| [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/201
| 8/01/wh...
| [deleted]
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's a little relevant. Twitter limits what you can see
| when you're logged out now, and if Twitter were breached
| your personally identifying information could leak out
| and put you in a dangerous situation.
|
| Be careful out there friends!
| notatoad wrote:
| it's a little relevant if you're the person sharing
| sensitive information that the government is trying to
| suppress. And if you're doing that, then yeah, take steps
| to keep yourself safe.
|
| if you're just trying to read information, like 99% of
| the people on twitter, then it's not really relevant.
| it's an unlikely hypothetical in the first place that
| twitter leaks those phone numbers, but no government is
| using phone numbers to hunt down consumers of
| information.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| It's not at all unlikely that a major service is hacked,
| especially at wartime. Twitter has been breached multiple
| times before.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > Twitter on Tor circumvents that censorship. Giving
| Twitter your phone number is irrelevant to that.
|
| Until the country you're living in gets your phone number
| from Twitter...
| mmaunder wrote:
| Privacy and freedom theater.
| belter wrote:
| It used to have some use before they started with their dark
| patterns. Can't stand their mandatory use of a phone
| number...
| david_draco wrote:
| Logging in is also annoying via Tor, requiring so many CAPTCHAs
| hereforphone wrote:
| And they'll still delete tweets they disagree with.
| unixbane wrote:
| samstave wrote:
| We need a site called "Squitter" ("squatting like twitter")
|
| But instead, you cant comment, interact at all. Its just empty
| profiles that one browses.
| exikyut wrote:
| Possibly what you're asking for: https://www.shlinkedin.com/
| sneak wrote:
| You can't create a usable Twitter account without providing a
| phone number, however, so this is effectively a meaningless
| gesture.
|
| Twitter does not want Twitter users to have privacy or
| pseudonymity from Twitter.
| FDSGSG wrote:
| You can just use a service like SMSPVA, phone verification
| doesn't break anonymity. It's a reasonable anti-spam measure,
| you have to burn a tiny amount of cryptocurrency in order to
| register.
| Madmallard wrote:
| cryptocurrency isn't anonymous though?
| FDSGSG wrote:
| What do you mean? Monero is definitely anonymous. Obviously
| all cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous, but anyone with half
| a brain can understand that I'm referring to anonymous
| cryptocurrencies.
| waffle_ss wrote:
| Many of these services use a limited pool of phone numbers
| that have already been used to register accounts on Twitter,
| and Twitter won't let you use them for fresh signups.
| FDSGSG wrote:
| SMSPVA has thousands of numbers that haven't been used on
| twitter, it also wont recycle the same numbers for the same
| service.
| waffle_ss wrote:
| Glad to hear they thought of that - I haven't used this
| particular service before. However, I just looked at it
| and there are zero United States numbers available to
| rent for Twitter signups right now.
|
| I could use one of the European numbers but given my
| experience with how sensitive Twitter is to sketchiness
| I'm guessing I'd get more random phone number
| verification requests.
| FDSGSG wrote:
| IME twitter doesn't care at all about which country your
| number is from.
| roastedpeacock wrote:
| Unfortunately I just checked with the new onion service and it
| appears nothing else has changed in that regard.
| Asraelite wrote:
| Sometimes you can't even view tweets if you're not logged in
| (there are workarounds though). Viewing media and threads also
| has extremely limited functionality in embedded contexts.
|
| This move is actually hilarious considering Twitter's policies.
| dmak wrote:
| Yeah you can. I created 3 in the last 3 months for different
| projects without linking a phone number. You just click
| register with email.
| sneak wrote:
| The account will be effectively suspended after following
| more than about ten people until you add a phone number.
| paulpauper wrote:
| prepare for captchas everywhere, phone verification everywhere
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| It just requires a regular login, 2fa or otherwise. Once the
| session cookies are there, it would presumably continue to
| behave as normal.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Tor IPs are very low trust and will trigger phone even if you
| logged in
| bombcar wrote:
| Hence the .onion, so you never leave tor (for twitter at
| least).
| Normille wrote:
| This Ukraine crisis is a goldmine for fans of hypocrisy and cant.
|
| I thought Shell's [0] trying to grab the moral high ground by
| withdrawing from Russia would take some beating. But "cancel
| culture central" Twatter spluttering about censorship gives it a
| run for its money.
|
| [0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/06/shell-
| complic...
| [deleted]
| LWIRVoltage wrote:
| That is interesting but we run into something that is now
| prevalent- I don't use it, but Twitter requires a phone number at
| singup, right?
|
| This is the same issue that is going on really heavily right now
| with Microsoft Accounts(and they are about to force the entire
| playerbase of Minecraft to give a phone number by pushing them to
| Microsoft accounts starting a day or two from now) (Note:This
| occurs without trying to use TOR during MS account creation, the
| system will lock you out afterwards- I assume TOR would be even
| more difficult)
|
| To my understanding, even Protonmail has a odd requirement where
| you have to verify by making a donation, if you try to initially
| sign up with TOR- and sure, they might only keep a hash , but
| this is a risk as someone could generate a hash of all potential
| phone numbers and them compare.
|
| Logging in via TOR afterwards to protonmail is good and all, but
| you aren't fully private then and can be compromised with out
| recourse it appears. [VPN would probably be the way to get around
| this][Protonmail is still probably the strongest option,
| especially since they won that court case they sued the Swiss gov
| in after being made to help the french government in that one
| case- now they are not able to be coerced at all - nontheless
| this signup TOR quirk is the only major thorn.]
|
| I get the feeling no one realizes that you have these additional
| hoops to creating an account on any service- and that data they
| force you provide, could be subject to a subpoena in a
| jurisdiction where they don't like something you did, etc ,etc.
| And no, VOIP numbers and burner numbers are now auto-detected by
| these services and pre-blocked en masse.
|
| I agree with another poster, Signal is probably okay in needing
| one, and they are working on removing that and providing unique
| identifiers at least, along with stripping as much metadata as
| they can. Other services seem to be going towards a point where
| you're at the mercy of whoever can compel or read the data they
| required of you to use services that did not require this.
|
| I wish services would instead turn towards TOTP and other
| authentication, to avoid spam. The fact that that sort of
| substitute doesn't allow one to bypass giving up details like
| Phone numbers- suggests it's about the data, not authentication
| or anti-spam, since they offer no alternate.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Another one is Telegram, a service which requires you to
| install an app on a mobile device and provide a phone number.
| It markets itself as a privacy app...
| coolspot wrote:
| It looks like almost all trendy "privacy" apps require a
| phone number: Signal, Protonmail...
| reflexco wrote:
| How would you use TOTP to mitigate spam exactly?
| LWIRVoltage wrote:
| If the idea is to stop some sort of massed emailing or
| posting or whatnot, using TOTP as a requirement to take those
| actions would slow that down to once every 30 seconds-
|
| if it's a matter of access and authentic access(as
| Microsoft's 'message' when they lock you out notes<suspicious
| activity>)) TOTP on actions a user may do, should cut down on
| the idea that an account is hacked.
|
| An initial idea -
|
| If they are worried about account creation being too fast, I
| suppose one idea then would be a TOTP client-side program
| that generates a unique account-generation code, one would
| need to create an account on a service to begin with- and
| time limit that from both sides, if the worry is a lot of
| accounts being generated in too short a time. This way, one
| can always kill the client code generator, and reinstall it,
| but overall that doesn't get around the fact you need that to
| make a full account on the service, and this would slow down
| creation from someone while not using phone numbers or other
| meta-data that would be usable against them from a privacy
| perspective.
|
| I would also look at how the teams from Signal, etc- are
| tackling that while reducing meta-data
|
| if the idea is indeed about having some method to track the
| user in a way you can discover other info about them through
| subsequent means directly, then that's ...what we'd want to
| avoid.
| [deleted]
| ectopod wrote:
| > they are about to force the entire playerbase of Minecraft to
| give a phone number by pushing them to Microsoft accounts
| starting a day or two from now
|
| Insisting on phone numbers would be a breach of the GDPR.
| Having entered into a contract a business cannot then demand
| additional personal information as a condition of fulfilling
| the contract.
| LWIRVoltage wrote:
| ...Does their current method get around this? They let you
| make the account, then a week or two later at most when you
| log in, it flags you and tells you due to 'suspicious
| activity', you now have to enter a phone number to get in
| specifically- as the account is now locked out otherwise. And
| VOIP numbers and burner numbers are autodetected and the
| system says to find a different number...
|
| Since they allow you to initially make the account, i wonder
| if that lets them 'attempt to' bypass this -
|
| Also, if that became a pain point eventually, they could make
| it so accounts made with European IP addresses from certain
| regions avoid this. (I think i've read on Reddit that
| european players get affected, but after contacting microsoft
| and citing GDPR with a form, they unlocked it- alas, the US
| and the rest of the world is forced to give a number then
| (not counting south korea which is a special case i've read)
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| IMO this is not very useful because any speech for which you'd
| want anonymity will likely be banned on Twitter anyway.
|
| You can jump through the hoops of procuring anonymous email
| address and phone numbers but in the end Twitter will ban any
| real political dissent. Cf. Last two years.
| KarlKemp wrote:
| Have you seen the news in, like, the last three weeks?
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| How does the news in the last three weeks refute my comment?
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| Calling Russia's war against Ukraine a "war" is speech that
| Russians in Russia _need_ anonymity for _right now_. And that
| 's not banned by Twitter.
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| There are certainly examples of political dissent that are
| not regularly banned by Twitter but that doesn't negate the
| fact that there are also examples of political dissent that
| are regularly banned by Twitter, which is the point of the
| OP.
| mrtranscendence wrote:
| There's a bunch of political dissent on Twitter. Don't harass
| people or incite violence and you'll largely be OK.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| > and you'll _largely_ be OK
|
| As long as you don't talk about a certain lab leak, or a
| laptop, yup!
|
| Oh wait, they decided those are allowed _now_ , sorry.
| Shared404 wrote:
| > When the debate is lost slander becomes the tool of the
| loser
|
| I like that quote from your profile, I think I'll start
| using it!
| hunterb123 wrote:
| Thanks, go for it, you'll have lots of opportunities to
| nowadays.
|
| Fun fact, it's attributed to Socrates often but there's
| no record of that.
|
| Snopes says they couldn't find any usage earlier than
| 2008.
|
| But like most Snopes articles that was wrong as there's
| someone using it from 2006 here:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20060529060643/http://freedom
| key...
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Twitter does not permit tweets that question or invalidate
| the official information coming out about COVID.
|
| "You may not use Twitter's services to share false or
| misleading information about COVID-19 which may lead to
| harm."
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-
| misin...
|
| Only blessed dissent is permitted.
| [deleted]
| hunterb123 wrote:
| The banning of Dr. R0b3rt MAl0n3 was peak irony of that
| rule.
|
| (had to use l33tspeak, was insta-flagged for saying his
| name, bot?)
|
| He invented the initial mRNA platform and performed the
| first mRNA vaccine experiments in 1989.
|
| That info was removed from wikipedia, but here's an
| archived version:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210614140319/https://en.wikip
| e...
|
| There's 9 patents in his name for the platforms and his
| name is all over the original mRNA experiments.
|
| He was banned for misinformation regarding the Covid-19
| vaccine...
| Akronymus wrote:
| So, science as more of a cult than the scientific method?
| [deleted]
| chrisamillions wrote:
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| meh. without the mandatory mobile verification, twitter is simply
| pointless to use via tor. maybe you are registered via mobile in
| a different country and you are currently in a hostile nation. if
| you are registered in the same country you are in, speaking
| against the government is pointless.
|
| maybe there is a usecase, i dont know. i stopped twitter back in
| 2013 i think. the signal to noise ratio was difficult back then,
| i cant imagine what it is now. sorry.
| unixbane wrote:
| > without the mandatory mobile verification, twitter is simply
| pointless to use via tor.
|
| i literally cannot understand your post. why would you ever
| want mobile verification unless for (crappy) 2fa purposes?
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| It's not well phrased; I _think_ OP is trying to say that if
| /since you cannot pass Twitter's mandatory mobile
| verification, you can't do anything on Twitter anyway, so Tor
| is pointless.
|
| I could be mis-interpreting.
|
| I agree that supporting Tor, but mandating phone, are
| completely contradictory stances for a platform to take. None
| of the posts here so far about "circumventing ISP blocks"
| feel persuasive or even realistic - if ISP is blocking
| platform such as twitter, they are doing it for a reason, and
| 9 times out of 10, that reason extends to you not wanting to
| give up your phone.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| because twitter is "forcing" you to give them mobile number
| for saving their asses when governments knock on their doors.
| neilalexander wrote:
| It's not about accessing Twitter anonymously. It's about being
| able to access Twitter when ISP-level blocking is in place.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| i would disagree. ISPs "generally" do not willy nilly
| restrict access to websites out of pleasure. it is either
| those anti-piracy shenanigans or other than that almost
| always government mandated. if a government DOES NOT want you
| to use twitter, your using it signifies to them you are a
| person of interest and they can put more efforts into finding
| you. i know because i have been a subject to those enquiries.
| They are not fun
| b0mbadilh0le wrote:
| So you can be censored anonymously?
| warent wrote:
| This seems like troll bait. The ELI5 version is that rich
| people and police are scary, so big companies have to please
| them.
|
| I'm not sure if you live in a communist nation, because people
| who really don't want to be censored are welcome to host their
| own Mastodon server or similar
|
| https://joinmastodon.org/
| jliptzin wrote:
| To all the idiots still complaining about censorship: there is
| more to the internet than twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. You
| can even build your own website!
|
| Private individuals have the right to free speech; private
| companies have the right to not host your speech on their
| private platforms; you have the right to make your own
| platform.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| Now members of the darknet can broadcast themselves. Anyone else
| see irony here?
| shiado wrote:
| Everybody should browse the internet on Tor from time to time to
| get an understanding about how the web works on a second class IP
| address and a slow connection. On some exit nodes reCAPTCHA
| actually enters an endless selection where it's impossible to
| pass.
| blowski wrote:
| Any specific suggestions for experiencing the difference? I've
| used Tor a bit, and can't say I noticed a huge amount of
| difference between that and browsing on a new mobile device.
| dessant wrote:
| If you're adventurous you could log into Google, PayPal and
| social media sites. Once you get past captcha challenges and
| manage to access your account, they may helpfully lock your
| account and never let you use it again, regardless of how
| much proof you provide for the ownership of the account to
| their support staff.
| blowski wrote:
| I see! That's something I've never done, I've mostly been
| using it to look at specific sites where I already knew the
| URL.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > reCAPTCHA actually enters an endless selection where it's
| impossible to pass
|
| I believe this is because from the same IP address there are
| other users who are _failing_ the recaptcha. So in between you
| starting, and clicking 'submit', there are a bunch of other
| wrong-answer recaptchas, so, when combined with your correct
| answer, it looks like you got it correct just by chance, not by
| being a human.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| This might be true for massive sites (eg Google) but smaller
| sites only if the cdn aggregates traffic to many different
| sites.
| londons_explore wrote:
| recaptchas logic to check if someone is a bot or not is
| global and run on googles servers, not site specific.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I wish a new web would form inside Tor instead so we could all
| leave the old compromised web behind.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| agluszak wrote:
| What an irony, Twitter is available on Tor, but it won't let you
| browse for longer than 0.3s without forcing to log in.
| nwiswell wrote:
| Yeah, the intention here is clearly to bypass state censorship.
| Twitter still wants to serve ads.
|
| Sort of unrelated, but you can bypass the login prompt if you
| click "login" and then click the X in the upper left of the
| popover.
| agluszak wrote:
| Or simply use nitter.net instead :)
| anjbe wrote:
| One interesting effect of Twitter's onion address: your 2FA
| options are limited. Any WebAuthn/FIDO/U2F keys you have
| registered with your Twitter account won't work, because the key
| registration is tied to the domain name. I have the same problem
| on Facebook. I can only use these onion sites if I log in with
| TOTP.
|
| One would think you could re-register the keys while logged in to
| the onion site, but I've never succeeded with this on Facebook or
| Twitter. I don't know if there is a technical limitation
| preventing WebAuthn from being used over onion sites, or just a
| problem with these particular sites' implementations. Tor itself
| is not the problem--you can use a registered WebAuthn key over
| Tor if the domains you're visiting are facebook.com or
| twitter.com.
| oauea wrote:
| Is this done to avoid Russian censorship? If so, interesting that
| Twitter's move is to go out of their way so they can still do
| business with Russians, while most other companies have decided
| that the correct choice is to sever all ties.
| yurish wrote:
| Tor is blocked in Russia.
| kvetching wrote:
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Im not sure if this has changed since my source was published
| but according to this article[0], the Tor Blocks in russia
| are not nation wide and originate from individual ISPs:
|
| >"According to OONI, it wasn't all of Russia blocking Tor; it
| was 15 out of 65 subnets. Moreover, each censorship instance
| used a different blocking method"
|
| >"If the censorship was government-sponsored, as the Tor
| Project suggested, then I would expect it to be much more
| widespread and consistent. This looks like individual
| blocking efforts. As OONI noted, the blocks followed a
| "recent spike in the use of Tor bridges (used for
| circumventing Tor blocking) in Russia."
|
| Though the situation might be totally different now
| considering the recent events.
|
| [0] https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/944
| -To...
| clownbaby wrote:
| For many companies, the current situation makes it very
| difficult to continue business operations from a logistical
| perspective, and because of that they are pulling out of Russia
| -- they are just using the narrative of boycotting Russia
| because of atrocities as a PR move which they also are
| benefiting from.
| pcmoney wrote:
| Why would you jump to a bad faith conclusion? Why would wanting
| to keep Twitter accessible to Russian nationals be bad? Twitter
| doesn't work in many countries such as China. There's just not
| a whole lot of money in Russia to advertise to either, entire
| economy is smaller than New York State's.
|
| This is much more aligned with Twitter's push for
| decentralization.
| atoav wrote:
| And the BBC is broadcasting their program on shortwave again --
| I don't think the classical way of thinking about sanctions
| directly applies to media type organisations.
|
| Of course one could argue russian trolls could use this to
| influence opinions on twitter as well, but wouldn't the most
| scary thing for Putin be his Russians getting non-state
| approved information on the war and the situation in Russia?
|
| If the goal of sanctions is to drive a wedge between the
| political leadership and it's population, and we assume it
| works in principle, excluding certain platforms where people
| can get outside informations might actually be a good thing.
| pigscantfly wrote:
| I think it is important that normal Russian people have access
| to outside sources of information to erode popular support of
| the war; their politicians seem to have no difficulty using
| Twitter to spread propaganda to the English-speaking world. I
| doubt the company is making any money from this or accepting
| Russian advertising, although I admit I don't have evidence to
| cite.
|
| I'm not affiliated with Twitter, nor do I use it, by the way.
| ashwagary wrote:
| >I think it is important that normal Russian people have
| access to outside sources of information
|
| I think this is true regardless of what they do with the
| information. Malice aside, I don't think freedom of
| information needs to necessarily serve another group's
| interest to be a worthy cause.
| w-j-w wrote:
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Yes; BBC just made its news available over tor a few days
| before: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50150981 (with
| the stupid title _BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror_)
| defanor wrote:
| I wondered why they do it back then, and wondering about
| Twitter now: when trying to access those from Russia, if you
| use Tor, it's easy to access the website on its regular
| address via an exit node. Of course an .onion wouldn't harm,
| but it doesn't make much difference. On the other hand, the
| government tries to block Tor in Russia since the last year,
| the bridges that used to work don't work anymore, and even if
| you obtain new ones to which you manage to connect, somehow
| Tor still fails to complete a connection to the network (I
| didn't investigate further yet). So a regular mirror is
| likely to be more useful than an .onion one (even though it's
| also likely to be blacklisted soon).
| defeatcensors wrote:
| Adding to the thread, there's also a directory of "real-world"
| onion services at https://www.yellowonion.org
| goodpoint wrote:
| To all the people who complain that Twitter over Tor is pointless
| because you have to login: it's not.
|
| A lot of people might have no concerns with identifying
| themselves with twitter but might be blocked by their ISPs or
| worried about some governments tracking them down.
|
| In those cases twitter over Tor makes a lot of sense.
|
| (and no, I'm not a fan of twitter myself and I don't use it)
| unixbane wrote:
| why would it be pointless? everything should be anonymous by
| default. that's how the internet always worked before corpo
| scum shat all over it.
|
| now the next question is whether you can actually _do_ anything
| over Tor on there. do they block you from half the
| functionality, such as searching, scrolling, etc? do they still
| pointlessly force a phone number as opposed to it being
| optional (why did this trend start right after snowden anyway)?
| can you even write a post? is this article just some PR
| generated crap and tor is still actually fully blocked? are
| they able to implement their trivial web application without
| javascript yet (so tor browser can be run in safe mode)? i made
| some accounts on tor 10 years ago there and they silently got
| deleted / shadowbanned (it seems the ones i used to DM a pre
| existing account got deleted)
| MayeulC wrote:
| The post you reply to implies that you have to login in order
| to access it.
|
| That's a good first step IMO, as this should balance out some
| fears of abuse from them. But I wouldn't be surprised if you
| can't create an account from Tor.
| randomsearch wrote:
| Truly incredible that it is not recognised that Twitter is part
| of the problem and not the solution.
|
| Somehow extensive journalism and investigation by government
| bodies seems to have been completely lost in the noise.
|
| Twitter and Facebook have been weaponised brilliantly by the
| Russians. They are a big part of how we got here.
| [deleted]
| Slikey wrote:
| I believe Twitter is trying to be better though and it appears
| they do chip away at this. They have also been in a difficult
| situation between cancel culture and free speech absolutism.
| Determining the reasonable solution is hard when the extreme
| edges and vocal minorities are yelling at you. My personal hope
| is that Twitter will further crack down on the very low hanging
| bots / trolls / alt accounts - there are many especially young
| accounts with handles like @Name359345809 which don't
| contribute to the platform in any way.
| ashwagary wrote:
| If abuse is dealt with adequately (which is a tall task), this
| approach allows more worldwide discussions which is a
| productive mission.
|
| Being able to remove ones self from heavily controlled
| corporate echo chambers is refreshing to thinkers that strive
| for objectivity.
| dash2 wrote:
| Actually I think Twitter has been at its best, at least since
| the start of the invasion. I've been able to access expertise,
| military and political; see eye-witness video from Russia and
| Ukraine; follow the news minute by minute. Bullshit has been
| called out. People have worked to geolocate war crimes. Russian
| trolls have completely failed to control the narrative.
| Ukraine's indomitable tractor drivers have nicked tanks. And
| the best evidence for this is the Russians shutting it down.
| practice9 wrote:
| And Twitter is the only platform that actually suspends the
| reported Russian disinformation bot/troll accounts (Youtube
| is bad at this)
| WanderPanda wrote:
| This is exactly my experience as well. Extremely high quality
| information with bullshit directly being called out (even in
| the case of pro Unrainian fake news like the ,,ghost of kiev"
| thing). I was waiting for the russian propaganda bots all the
| time but they never showed up (except for one youtube video
| where the whole comment section was full of whataboutism).
| Compared to what you get from curating a hand full of twitter
| accounts with a good track record / reputation traditional
| media and government outlets are pure noise in my experience.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Bullshit has been called out.
|
| Research and, IMHO, reason show that unless you have real
| domain expertise or direct experience of the event, you can't
| distinguish well-crafted bullshit from truth.
|
| > I've been able to access expertise, military and political
|
| Those are accessible outside Twitter. Better, the expertise
| is less diluted by noise, and you get expertise + focused
| work (papers and articles, with editors, etc.) not hot takes.
| Just read foreign policy publications like Foriegn Policy or
| Foreign Affairs.
|
| > Russian trolls have completely failed to control the
| narrative. ... And the best evidence for this is the Russians
| shutting it down.
|
| That may be true in this case (I am not so ready to conclude
| it), but we know well that it hasn't been true in many others
| and won't be true in yet more, and people can't distinguish.
| Also, that does't mean others don't control the narrative -
| people who using the crisis for their own ends or even people
| you coincidentally support.
| dash2 wrote:
| It's true that expertise is available outside Twitter, but
| Twitter has been great at letting me find it. The mechanism
| is retweets from people I trust. Note, trust also helps
| distinguish bullshit from truth. I don't know what a
| Javelin is, or how the war in the south is progressing, but
| the right journalist can find the right expert who does.
|
| I don't say these problems have been solved perfectly, just
| that they're better than I expected.
| anonporridge wrote:
| True, but a conversation about that can't exclude the fact that
| state sponsored information streams have been weaponized ever
| since the first states started providing official information.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Most excellent first step.
|
| Now please get rid of the 'have you signed in yet?' popup, and
| you'll be back to being an actual useful resource on the
| internet.
|
| [edit]: and in the meantime, I'll keep on using nitter.net
| [deleted]
| potatoman22 wrote:
| What's in it for Twitter?
| iszomer wrote:
| Maybe they want to improve their fingerprinting heuristics by
| providing an illusion of anonymous communications over Tor?
| /shrug
| uwuemu wrote:
| If they want to be a walled garden, they can be a walled
| garden. But no embeds, no free traffic from all the news
| sites and blogs. No free traffic from google. You can't have
| the cake and eat it too. All of this scumbaggery with serving
| X to google and serving Z to the humans has to go. It's
| internet cancer. And I don't use that word ligthly. It's not
| just Twitter that does this, instagram, facebook, etc. all do
| this. It should have been regulated away a long time ago and
| harshly fined because THAT is what makes the current internet
| not open. Internet is about free(ish) access to information,
| and like it or not, Twitter is the current "breaking news"
| creator and aggeregator #1 (by orders of magnitude). If an
| adult voluntarily posts content to twitter, content that is
| intended to be public, an twitter tries to prevent public
| access to that information, a reaction to that should be
| disgust, not saying "what's in in for twitter". What's in it
| for ME. Me. Me. Me. I. My family. Maybe my friends. My
| company. Everyone else can go fuck themselves, right?
|
| The situation with Ukraine and a lot of news and media
| breaking on twitter are a current, glaring representation of
| how twitter makes money on people's suffering... but it isn't
| the first and sadly won't be the last, because of people like
| you.
| tonguez wrote:
| In order to begin being an actual useful resource on the
| internet they have to, among other things, get rid of the
| feature where you have to click "load more" 10 times to read
| the small fraction of replies to a Tweet that Twitter does not
| censor completely.
|
| If a tweet has 100 replies, it generally only shows the most
| pro-neocon/PC response, and you have to click "Load More", then
| it will show 1 more response, you keep clicking "Load More",
| and eventually there's no more "Load More" button, and you've
| only seen 5 responses. Where are the other 95 responses that
| Twitter deemed to be wrongthink?
|
| Why would anyone use a website like that when you're only
| getting curated propaganda? It's like sitting in front of the
| TV and only watching ads with no actual content.
| guelo wrote:
| That "load more" is extremely annoying. I believe it's an a/b
| test because I only see it with one of my accounts. It seems
| to get triggered when the http referer is from another social
| site. I found you can get rid of it by re-opening the link in
| another tab by control-clicking on the tweet timestamp.
| FabHK wrote:
| Plus the "it's better in the App!" popup on mobile, and the
| requirement for Javascript just to serve 280 characters...
| rplnt wrote:
| And when I click the "open in the app", it doesn't even work.
| snek_case wrote:
| Reddit has the same bullshit problem. The website works
| perfectly fine on mobile, except it keeps trying to force
| you to use the app for absolutely no reason, and the app
| often works poorly.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Not to mention the iPhone App made by Reddit is that one
| giant sucking sound of your privacy.
| [deleted]
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| This is not a real problem as tweets and their replies are all
| publicly available. Likely brought on yourself by using ad-
| blocker or something triggering it (which Twitter has every
| right to try to encourage you to log in or use the site more
| regularly)
| kilroy123 wrote:
| This a million times
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| (and if you DO want me to sign up, do not mandate a telephone
| number; you don't need it, I don't want to give it to you)
| segmondy wrote:
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I may be in minority, but yes.
|
| Understanding that "Free" is the only way to grow a
| platform, once there, I'd happily pay $X/month for
| Facebook, Twitter, etc that's customizable to the format
| and amount of tracking that I want.
|
| That is completely unrealistic, of course, but that wasn't
| your question, so I can happily and honestly answer "Yes"
| :)
| amatecha wrote:
| there used to be such a service, App.net[0], which was
| basically "paid twitter". It was pretty awesome. Not only
| was there the App.net client which was an analogue to
| Twitter, devs could make other services which you could
| log into with your App.net identity, for example there
| was an excellent Instagram-like app "Favd"[1] that could
| post to Twitter, FB and App.net.
|
| [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130116194906/https://ap
| p.net/a...
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140922104251/http://pic
| .favd.n...
| zeepzeep wrote:
| > I may be in minority, but yes.
|
| Do you know what's the best thing about that? It's okay
| if only a part of the population pays for each service.
|
| If enough people have Twitter Blue to make Twitter
| profitable, and are enjoying the comments and type of
| content the tons of non-paying users are making, it's
| win-win.
|
| One person hast Twitter Blue, another one has Facebook
| Deluxe, and some others don't pay for online services at
| all. But these who don't pay are creating content people
| are willing to pay for.
|
| That's how free to play games work, so it's not
| unrealistic.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Exactly; I'm happy to be a "Whale" on a number of games
| and services :)
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Twitter's financials are public. They aren't making any
| obvious money from having your phone. It's more likely
| there to let them stop people from harvesting/selling
| accounts.
| eatsyourtacos wrote:
| Hard to use that logic when there are a small monopoly of
| services out there.
| bena wrote:
| I agree, but I do find this take funny considering the
| history of Twitter.
| amatecha wrote:
| Right, I remember you used to be able to sign up for
| Twitter solely with a phone number (and post tweets via
| SMS, a feature which I used every so often). You can see
| that if you look at an old archive of the site: https://web
| .archive.org/web/20061203201128/http://twitter.co... (heh,
| also gotta love that the site was so small they can just
| show some random recent tweets and users right on the
| homepage)
|
| This was in the days before legit smartphones so running an
| actual "twitter client" was out of the question. Of course
| that all quickly changed with the advent of smartphones
| like the iPhone.
| car_analogy wrote:
| Oh they don't - you can sign-up without one, and iirc,
| Twitter doesn't indicate anywhere that one is needed. But all
| new accounts just happen to exhibit suspicious activity and
| are blocked until submitting a phone number. This is all mere
| coincidence, and certainly not an effort by Twitter to
| conceal how much personal information they want for an
| account.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| How much compute power does it take to mine these vanity .onion
| domains?
| dkarp wrote:
| according to [1], about a day for the 7 character twitter url
| on a 1.5GHz machine. So nothing really for a company like
| twitter.
|
| [1] https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot
| beardog wrote:
| Shallot (at least that version) is for v2 onions only which
| are truncated sha1 hashes of RSA keys. v3 onions are
| base32-encoded ed25519 so 7 characters translates to needing
| to force 35 bits of ed25519, which according to [2] should be
| in the same ballpark but does not get specific as far as I
| read.
|
| [1]https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-
| spec-v3....
|
| [2]https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| EC keys don't require a search for prime numbers so it
| should be faster.
| beardog wrote:
| Plus it doesn't use the sha1sum, not to say it is a
| particularly slow function.
| edm0nd wrote:
| No one can use a v2 onion address any longer. They do not
| resolve. V3 .onion vanity urls can be created using
| https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o
| smlavine wrote:
| > JavaScript is not available.
|
| Sure it is.
| mooreds wrote:
| More details from the thread:
|
| https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-supported-...
| lists the Tor network as a supported browser
|
| Implemented using https://github.com/alecmuffett/eotk/
|
| Edit: made URLs clickable as well.
| awb wrote:
| Making URLs clickable.
|
| More details from the thread:
|
| * https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-
| supported-... lists the Tor network as a supported browser
|
| * Implemented using https://github.com/alecmuffett/eotk/
| mooreds wrote:
| Thanks, sorry about that, updated my comment too.
| jquery wrote:
| I'm taking off my cynical goggles and giving this a round of
| applause. Even if I think Twitter could do more, this is a great
| move on their part.
| noasaservice wrote:
| Is it still going to require to deanonymize yourself with a real
| cell phone number? As opposed to a virtual phone# like GVoice,
| Trello, etc?
| caymanjim wrote:
| Why require any phone number? I hate Twitter and won't use it
| either way, but they have no business asking for phone numbers.
| Stevvo wrote:
| Originally Twitter was over SMS. That's why Tweets were
| limited to 140 characters; it's all you could fit. So they
| did have a reason to ask for phone numbers from the
| beginning.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Ok but now, what feels like a 100 years later, they don't
| anymore. It's just another data point to identify users and
| sell that information eventually.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| And today the hard requirement is???
| rhexs wrote:
| Have you tried making any accounts online these days without
| a phone number? Good luck -- there are extremely few services
| left that allow it due to "abuse" and other nonsense.
|
| My favorite case of this is that you used to be able to
| create a google account through android without a phone
| number. Assuming this is still possible, if you do this your
| account will be immediately suspended for "suspicious
| activity" and require a phone to unlock.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| I use one service that requires a phone number: Signal. I'm
| doing alright on the internet. If your service requires a
| phone number to sign up, I will not use it, period. If more
| people thought like me this would be a problem, but the
| majority seems hell bent on spreading their cheeks for
| peanuts these days.
| noasaservice wrote:
| If you hate twitter so much, then respectfully, why are you
| commenting? This post is exclusively about Twitter and Tor.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Not OP but my 2 cents:
|
| "Hate" / "Dislike" / Critical Post / Negative comment, is
| just as valid as "Love" / "Like" / Positive Comment. Either
| may be productive (constructive feedback or earned support)
| or unproductive (pointless criticism as much as baseless
| love).
|
| In fact, as owner of any service/product/store,
| constructive negative feedback is valuable. My wife is a
| store manager and subscribes to "Feedback is a gift"
| philosophy - is a customer is going to leave, she'd
| appreciate knowing, in constructive way, why they are
| leaving.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| So people are only allowed to be positive on topics? I
| don't think HN got that memo.
|
| Don't open a Tesla, Facebook, or crypto article, you'll be
| shocked to see how many people hate those things and are
| commenting anyway!
| caymanjim wrote:
| There's a general tone of commentary here that it's good
| that Twitter is accepting Tor connections. I think that's a
| good thing. There's also a lot of side-commentary about how
| Twitter shouldn't be overly-praised for this because they
| follow plenty of other dark patterns, most notably
| requiring a login and collecting phone numbers and other
| personal information. The main reason I hate Twitter is
| because of their dark patterns (and shitty UI). If they
| stopped collecting phone numbers, I'd hate them less.
| Minor49er wrote:
| I tried to create an account a few months ago with virtual
| phone numbers since I don't want to give it my real one. Every
| attempt was rejected
| sandeeps_ wrote:
| It's possible to create a twitter account without a phone
| number. You'll initially get suspended and get an email
| stating why. Just reply to that email (open a ticket) and
| they will approve the account without a phone number.
| paulpauper wrote:
| use a proxy, a new chrome session, and throwaway email
| address.
| Minor49er wrote:
| But what about the phone number?
| paulpauper wrote:
| most twitter accounts do not have a phone attached to it.
| you must be doing something to trip up the phone
| verification thing
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