Using the word "conspiracy" in this conversation about TOR is wild to me.

In a post-Snowden world, it surprises me how anyone wouldn't give reasonable doubt to the THE most interesting and juicy tool linked to the US military post-2001. The tool that people think hides what they are doing and hides who they are.

If there's one thing I know, it's that the US would never in a million years leave a data source untapped or a new NIST crypto standard untampered. Their fingers are in every pie.

You yourself spoke with the founder about this?

I will make a correction. What I should have said is that out of the top 10 networks hosting relays or exit nodes, that close to half have an American presence and that the vast majority 80-90% of relays and exit nodes are spread out within 14 eyes countries - you can see it yourself when you look at the network. When was the last time you looked at where it was connected to and did not see a flag within either 5 eyes, 9 eyes or 14 eyes countries? While that maybe isn't the proof you want, it sure is a meaty coincidence and another reason on top of who funds it and what its purpose is for.

'Just false.'

It depends where you are from. The US constitution is supposed to prevent spying on American citizens, but anyone outside of the USA is fair game. Most of the global population is not in the USA (like me).

'If your model is simply to avoid corporate surveillance and tracking its a fantastic defense.' - I host an onion service exactly for that reason, not for my own privacy but to let customers have that with us if they want.

'If your trying to go up against nation states, it never claimed to protect you from that.' - I disagree, it will protect an American spy a treat.

It was and still is funded mostly by the US Naval Research Laboratory. And considering most of the nodes are hosted on American cloud infra, if those companies share with the US Govt in real-time what is connecting in and out then the entire chain can be figured out much of the time without any kind of timing attacks. The regular person using it doesn't get as much of the privacy benefits, but the charade is making it seem like they do.

I know lots of people really believe in TOR - fair play to them. I just know it in my bones it's not as it seems.

Thanks for the interest :)

The site is https://www.mycoscopy.uk/

It intentionally runs like a guest order website, I think the only people so far who've really used it are the privacy geeks who also like mushroom spores and cultivation - niche clientele (but my kind of people).

Depending on how well this project goes, it's only a few days old - but it's taking orders, I'm hoping to move our main shop to a similar setup and running it from home because WP/Woo and even linux servers (I tend to use Debian) are giving me a lot of anxiety with the security situation. I fear that I worry about our customers data than even they do!

(OpenBSD)