Silk Road forums
Discussion => Newbie discussion => Topic started by: wileycoyote on May 08, 2013, 03:54 am
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Is it safe to visit "clearnet" sites from your TOR Browser?
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The Tor Browser is supposed to be used to visit the regular web. Hidden services are an extra service it can do.
If you see a URL to a youtube video or something, don't suddenly whip out your regular browser and watch it. You can be deanonymized that way. Everything you see using Tor, you visit using Tor.
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ah right, thank you. i was never fully sure about this.
also. if it is fine to visit clearnet sites using tor, why do people post a warning before pasting a clearnet link?
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ah right, thank you. i was never fully sure about this.
also. if it is fine to visit clearnet sites using tor, why do people post a warning before pasting a clearnet link?
i'd love to hear an answer to this question
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ah right, thank you. i was never fully sure about this.
also. if it is fine to visit clearnet sites using tor, why do people post a warning before pasting a clearnet link?
Perhaps some people use a regular browser and the onion.to service. If you are doing this and open a clearnet site you will no longer be anonymous, the clearnet site might even have tracking to see what site you just came from. In fact, most retail sites track what page you came from for the sake of advertising.
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ah right, thank you. i was never fully sure about this.
also. if it is fine to visit clearnet sites using tor, why do people post a warning before pasting a clearnet link?
i'd love to hear an answer to this question
It's a darknet meme. A bit like those "Pass this message on or your mother will die in sixteen days in a car crash" messages you get on social media networks like Facepalm.
There are deanonymization dangers to the clearnet sites of course. Such as:
- Logging into them to your real account e.g. email, facepalm, twatter etc.
- Downloading things like pdfs and then opening them without using a virtual machine to contain them (can leak your real IP address).
- All information going from you to the website has to be encrypted if you want it to be private. This is because exit nodes which connect the regular web to the darknet can surveil your communications. If you want to send an email and keep it private, it doesn't somehow get magically decrypted when it leaves the Tor Network, it is plaintext at the exit node as is your HTTP web traffic. You have to use PGP encryption to make end to end encryption if you want that.
- Following clearnet links posted on this forum with your regular internet browser can deanonymize you easily. People who post "clearnet warnings", funnily enough, may actually be deanonymizing themselves.
But basically there is little difference between hidden services and surfing the regular web. You'll notice experienced members of this forum never use clearnet warnings. While you're using the Tor Browser Bundle you're anonymous (unless you goof up like I mentioned). When you use your regular internet browser you're not. You have to separate the two in your head, they may look like similar interfaces but they're different.
If you want to prove this to yourself because you don't believe Pine, then do a web based ip lookup with some online IP address detecting service using your regular browser and then compare the same with your Tor browser. The IP addresses will be different. The Tor browser will have the IP address of some exit node.