On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
The problem I see is that this technology will be used (literally, not ideally) solely for harassment (especially via IRC). I do not see any other practical use for this technology other than that. The whole "right to privacy/anonymity" argument is legitimate, but I do not see people using* Tor for legitimate purposes.
Tor is just a brand name. Its not the first, last or only way. As long as there are people, there will be people that abuse things. Every open service has been abused: USENET, SMTP, IRC, DNS, DHCP, TTY/TDD Relay for the deaf, etc. The Internet is just a small community of 500 million or so of your closest friends you don't know. People have known since rlogin, rexec, rsh relying on IP addresses as a method to control access has limitations. Caller ID isn't that much more secure. It is extremely unlikely we will ever make all or even most of the network hosts secure, and there will continue to be new applications being created all the time. Applications designers should probably consider using application and higher layer authentication methods if they don't want their applications used as open relays for abuse. You can't control what the rest of the world does, but you can set the policy for using your own application.