Silk Road forums

how safe are obfuscating bridges to hide TOR use?  Surely people using TOR get flagged? Or is it now fairly widespread so no point?

The Tor Project estimates 500,000 daily Tor users. Based on TBB downloads, I estimate 3-5 million monthly users.

Many people use Tor for many reasons, certainly enough to give any random Tor user plausible deniability. I see no reason to be paranoid about using Tor unless you are a big time vendor, in which case LE could launch a correlation attack based on your online activity. If you are a big time vendor, you should be using bridges or VPNs, otherwise, I think it's overkill.

any idea why this would come up ? after they updated the forums and i didnt change any features on my tor. so should i be concerned or just ignore ?

Honestly man, one thing I've learned from talking to hundreds, possibly thousands of people on this forum is that when people tell me they are sure of something, 90% of the time they are wrong. The reason you just noticed this notification is either:

a) you just happened to notice

b) you turned on NoScript recently

JavaScript has always been a part of this forum. I noticed the notifications myself long ago when I turned on NoScript and didn't have the notifications disabled. Nothing has changed about that. You are simply mistaken about this being a new notification on the forum.

What should you do?

a) Disable JavaScript on the forum?  Yes, that's fine.

b) Leave JavaScript on?  Yes, that's also fine.

I see no problem with either option and you've turned a non-issue into an issue.

Astor, thanks for the reply. I have a couple more questions...

Do I have to download TOR onto a USB so I can access my PGP key? How else would I access my PGP key if I don't use a USB and stick to a CD... Is this possible? Other than my key, I have no reason to ever safe anything onto tails.

+ Basically, if I run tails there will never be anything written on my hard drive or router, so if the LE confinscates my laptop they will find nothing?

You need to transfer Tails to a thumb drive to enable the persistent volume, to save your key. You can't do that on a CD.

LE won't find anything on your hard drive. They could find the thumb drive but they would only see an encrypted volume, not its contents. Of course, an thumb drive is relatively easy to get rid of, flush it down the toilet, throw it out the window. You could have time to get rid of it even in a raid. It's much better than having data stored on your hard drive, which takes hours to overwrite.

helpmywife, the most likely reason is that you are not putting "obfs2" or "obfs3" before the IP address.

Normally when you add bridges, you enter something like this:

12.34.56.78:433

But for an obfs2 bridge, you enter:

obfs2 12.34.56.78:433

Also note when you go to bridges.torproject.org that the obfs2 and obfs3 bridges are listed separately from normal bridges. Not all bridges support the version 2 and 3 protocols.

The only functionality that I've noticed that gets disabled with JavaScript blocked is the ability to insert smilies into posts and the modal dialog box to confirm deleting multiple PMs. If you can live without those features, you can keep scripts disabled on the forum. Just disable the notification too.

I'm excited about Onion Bank, which allows you to integrate payments into any (hidden service) web site. It gives merchants the opportunity to be independent of the walled gardens of the existing markets, and for only a 2.5% escrow fee, although the real value of the markets is exposure to buyers. Still, I think it could lead to a lot of innovation in onionspace.

The commission is based on the total order price.

Yes, Social Security Numbers and concentration camp numbers are similar in that they are both numbers assigned to people.

And that pretty much ends the similarity between concentration camps and modern life in America.