The reason why what I am saying is contrary to the belief of almost my entire audience is because almost all of my audience was exposed to misinformation about Tor from dumbasses like you who talk about things they don't know about. Nobody who actually knows about Tor thinks that there is no technical way to trace a hidden service, so the only people who are saying this are either talking out of their assholes or have been exposed to misinformation from others who do so. I am sorry if you were merely exposed to misinformation and are mindlessly propagating it rather than intentionally making shit up for whatever reason, but really in either case it irritates the fuck out of me and you deserve to be bitched at. This thread is a perfect example of why I have little tolerance for people who are blatantly talking out of their assholes without even TRYING to properly understand the material or even find the material required to form an opinion (guess what it isn't a news article that says Tor is untraceable). Because of people intentionally talking out of their ass about things they know nothing about, or intentionally spreading misinformation to their adversaries, or people propagating bullshit they hear without verification or deeper understanding, the majority of people running Tor hidden services are at far greater risk than they realize. This irritates me because it puts peoples lives in danger. I am even irritated that the Tor devs only make the 'security pitfalls' of Tor that the user can fix be well known (like cookies, flash proxy by pass attacks, etc) while the real serious attacks on the actual design of Tor are hidden away in TL:DR academic research papers that sometimes are not even directly discussing Tor in the first place. I am also very irritated that they still say "Tor prevents anyone from learning your location or browsing habits." on their homepage, when they know it isn't true (for example they know Tor offers zero protection from a global passive adversary). I do trust the Tor people though and I think they are some of the best researchers when it comes to anonymity. For what it is worth the lead dev of Tor, Roger Dingledine, used to work for the NSA. This isn't widely known and I think it probably should be. He openly admits it if questioned, but the average user of Tor is not aware of the fact. I personally am not afraid of that fact since Tor is audited by so many other people, but I do find it somewhat strange that he went from working for a signals intelligence agency to working on a tool for countering signals intelligence. Then again, NSA also wants to counter signals intelligence. Also most people who take anonymity seriously realize that the NSA can trace Tor users, either via proxy by pass attacks or in many cases (probably the majority, especially if the target uses Tor regularly for an extended period of time) by actual signals intelligence analysis.