According to statistics, many thousands of people access shady sites via Tor every day. While most users say they use the systems because they want to stay anonymous, some exploit the layers of proxies to find drugs.
Originally, the Onion Router has been created by the US Navy a decade ago in order to keep government communications safe from prying eyes. The reports say that Tor had reached about 600.000 users annually. The way it works is quite simple to understand – instead of using one proxy to hide the IP addresses, it uses a whole chain of proxies, hence its name.
A decade ago nobody had this concept of privacy, but now this doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. While Tor claims to be used daily for various purposes by the military, journalists, law enforcement officers and activists, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center is warning that 1/3 of its users are suspected of conducting a wide range of unauthorized activities. Some people confessed they had started using Tor to buy drugs online. This is why some experts now believe that Tor should be blacklisted by governments. As for the United Kingdom, the country’s Prime Minister believes that sites and search engines have to take responsibility for what they offer, particularly when it comes to kids porn. David Cameron believes that Internet companies and search engines should use their extraordinary technical abilities to do more to root out child pornography. As a result, the government keeps convening a round-table of the largest online companies and demands to do more.
In the meanwhile, the backside of the problem is privacy – this is an overgrowing concern in the past several years. The experts admit that because of government collusion with record companies and rights owners to crack down on file-sharing copyrighted content, Internet users had to start using such networks as Tor, which were previously only used by advanced users and people looking for illegal content. So, people targeted by this type of law will do what they can to seek out material.
Among Tor users, there are innocent family people – they use Tor because they just don’t want themselves or family followed around by councils or the police. While the industry experts agree that the problems at hand can’t be ignored, the issue could easily get out of hand, like it happened with P2P.
Originally, the Onion Router has been created by the US Navy a decade ago in order to keep government communications safe from prying eyes. The reports say that Tor had reached about 600.000 users annually. The way it works is quite simple to understand – instead of using one proxy to hide the IP addresses, it uses a whole chain of proxies, hence its name.
A decade ago nobody had this concept of privacy, but now this doesn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. While Tor claims to be used daily for various purposes by the military, journalists, law enforcement officers and activists, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center is warning that 1/3 of its users are suspected of conducting a wide range of unauthorized activities. Some people confessed they had started using Tor to buy drugs online. This is why some experts now believe that Tor should be blacklisted by governments. As for the United Kingdom, the country’s Prime Minister believes that sites and search engines have to take responsibility for what they offer, particularly when it comes to kids porn. David Cameron believes that Internet companies and search engines should use their extraordinary technical abilities to do more to root out child pornography. As a result, the government keeps convening a round-table of the largest online companies and demands to do more.
In the meanwhile, the backside of the problem is privacy – this is an overgrowing concern in the past several years. The experts admit that because of government collusion with record companies and rights owners to crack down on file-sharing copyrighted content, Internet users had to start using such networks as Tor, which were previously only used by advanced users and people looking for illegal content. So, people targeted by this type of law will do what they can to seek out material.
Among Tor users, there are innocent family people – they use Tor because they just don’t want themselves or family followed around by councils or the police. While the industry experts agree that the problems at hand can’t be ignored, the issue could easily get out of hand, like it happened with P2P.
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