To put it into terms that an old toper like me is comfortable some people drink their win by the litre carafe (and, as an old toper, why don't they have 2 litre carafes?), some like a fresh small glass each time. It's safe to say that the method chosen might be the best available but it's a horribly misleading one to give us a good picture of the true usage patterns. There's more there for those interested in the technical details. But if you spend 1 second each at 100 hidden services, you make about 100 requests.) Therefore, obsessive users who visit many sites in a session account for many more of the requests that this study measures than users who visit a smaller number of sites with equal frequency.

(If you spend hours at one hidden service, you make about 1 hidden service directory request. Basically, a Tor client makes a hidden service directory request the first time it visits a hidden service that it has not been to in a while.

That’s over five times as many as any of the other categories of content that he and his researchers found in their Dark Web survey, such as gambling, bitcoin-related sites or anonymous whistle-blowing.įirst, some background. More than four out of five Tor hidden services site visits were to online destinations with pedophilia materials, according to Owen’s study. The study paints an ugly portrait of that Internet underground: drug forums and contraband markets are the largest single category of sites hidden under Tor’s protection, but traffic to them is dwarfed by visits to child abuse sites. I forsee something very similar happening here: We've already had at least one senior cop shouting that Google and Apple shouldn't encrypt phones because that might endanger one child, one hypothetical child at some hypothetical future date.

The way the numbers are presented I'd give it no more than 72 hours before someone, somewhere, tells us that as a matter of public policy Tor must be disabled, shut down or otherwise censored. There's a fairly shocking piece of research floating around out there telling us how much of the traffic on Tor, the anonymising system, is apparently people searching for child porn and paedohilia.

Tor porn url