The defender also not only has to discover issues but get them deployed. Installing patches takes time, and once the patch is available, the attacker can use it to reverse engineer the exploit and use it attack unpatched systems. This is happening in a matter of hours these days, and AI can accelerate this.

It is also entirely possible that the defender will never create patches or users will never deploy patches to systems because it is not economically viable. Things like cheap IoT sensors can have vulnerabilities that don't get addressed because there is no profit in spending the tokens to find and fix flaws. Even if they were fixed, users might not know about patches or care to take the time to deploy them because they don't see it worth their time.

Yes, there are many major systems that do have the resources to do reviews and fix problems and deploy patches. But there is an enormous installed base of code that is going to be vulnerable for a long time.

It sort of speaks to the fact that it isn’t selling well that they are using them for loaners.

It’s a pretty unappealing car.

But I don’t think we disagree. My view is that TOR is inadequate against a nation state attack because for some of these attacks it is easier to do mass de-anonymization and hope you get some particular user or set of users you are interested in. The resources to do this are small for something the scale of an intelligence agency, but excessively large for some local police department.

I’m not sure why you appear so hostile to citing attacks that are well-known and already part of the public threat model.

https://github.com/Attacks-on-Tor/Attacks-on-Tor

and if you can get the guard and exit node for a clearnet connection and the guard, rendezvous point and exit for the onion service that can be enough.

https://support.torproject.org/relay-operators/exit-policies...

The documents you referred to just say you need to honor your own exit policy.

To me, TOR is not adequate to protect users targeted by a nation state who are the ones that TOR claims to be created for.

Edit: on second look I can see how you could think it was. I’m just proposing that if you run a node you be allowed to not become a rendezvous point for onion sites.

https://99firms.com/research/tor-stats

Says there seem to be about 65k onion sites.

This site:

https://protectchildren.ca/en/press-and-media/blog/2025/tor-...

Has some varying numbers depending on the observation time, but in final month listed saw 30k sites that had they identified as having CSAM.

I’m not sure how accurate either number is or if they are directly comparable but that would be a 50% of all onion sites ballpark.

Not sure how to measure general sites vs dedicated abuse sites.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/05/flesh-ea...

Archive link: https://archive.ph/3sD9d

Ideas that survive are the ones that anticipate and pre-empt criticism rather than the ones that are creative or innovative. There is little consideration of ethics and value or harm to society.

Honestly, I think it is damaging to the field. It is very demoralizing for newcomers to be subject to repeated criticism and not encouragement. There isn’t much culture of mutual support. I’ve been told by NSF personnel at review panels that CS grants proposals get much lower review scores than those of other sciences because the CS reviewers are so critical and that’s problematic for the field as a whole because it was hard to justify finding proposals with low scores when the funds could go to higher scoring proposals in other fields (though this was many years ago).

So in short, yes, it is also my experience. I’ve worked around it by trying to work with people from other disciplines which have better cultures.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_City_of_Rayville

This article is essentially referring only to edge cases which require context to determine if images are CSAM. There are other cases where context is not needed and determining if something is CSAM is sadly easy.

For example, there is no appropriate context for images or videos of adults raping toddlers or infants.