Is TOR really anonymous?

[Ben]

It never ceases to amaze me that all of the things that "computer power users" believe to be their tools and to have been developed by their peers or by "hackers", (an old term for someone who puts computers together themselves), made in their basements or garages, turns out to have been manufactured by those whom they seek to hide from. Hehehe.

People are easily fooled primarily because they are mentally lazy.

TOR is private? Read this;

Who made the Deep Web?

The “Deep Web,” or Tor network, was actually originally funded by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, which developed the network with the hope that it could properly protect and encrypt government communications. From 2004 to 2005 it was supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but is now run by the Tor Project. To this day it is still largely funded by government organizations across the world, including the United States.

And I'll tell you something now; once a government agency, (DARPA, Military, University), makes something, they never loose control over it and if it is still in operation, never give it away. NEVER!

The Internet itself was made by ARPA the forerunner of DARPA.

You might as well call DARPA a military organization. Militaries are created to work against an enemy and for no other reason.

Since you are not the military, (and are no part of them), and you use it, (the Internet), what does that make you in relation to the military?

Pretty simple huh? Yet you cannot draw a conclusion from it. Because you cannot look at yourself in the light of day.

You should ask yourself "why can't I?" And you should force yourself to face the answer.

Anyway... just some thought stimulus for those who can still think.

[Martin Iturbide]

It is good the check out how Tor works:
https://www.torproject.org/about/overview

And it is also good to check the Onion Routing by  U.S. Naval Research Laboratory.
http://www.onion-router.net/

I had seen an article on how they find out a guy that uses to TOR to report a fake bomb on a  University.
They look on the University network the users that was using TOR (connection to Tor networks), they narrow the list to the users and compared which students had an examen at that hour. They narrow more the list and interrogate the student until they squeezed the truth out

The other way I saw is that someone was trying to fake the "Tor Nodes", but that is hard since you need to fake all the nodes that a user is using.

But it is good to read more about it.

[Ben]

Oh, well.

I just spent an half hour researching and writing an educated reply.

OS/2 World/Firefox ate it, so that's the end of this thread for me.

Sorry, but that's way it sometimes goes.

Martin, I have "stayed logged in" checked, but that doesn't solve the problem.

That it did give the poster some more time on the old forum, but something has changed in this incarnation; you might want to check the "cookie settings" in the SMF forum server settings and/or in Joomla/Mambo settings. I have cleaned out and reset the cookies several times in Firefox; it changes nothing.

Other users here have complained of the same issue. Paul Smedley is aware of it too and related it to a known problem with PHP. It might not be fixable.

Usually I can pull my lost message out of the cache when this happens, but not this time and I cannot afford the time to rewrite it.

This post is just FYI.

[Martin Iturbide]

We need something like Lazarus on Firefox.

Can you check if it works on the firefox on OS/2 ?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/lazarus-form-recovery/

[Ben]

I have installed it and I will test it out.

Since this is a TOR  thread, privacy is an issue.

This is what I found in the Lazarus FAQ;

Where does Lazarus keep the saved forms?

Lazarus saves all its form information inside an SQLite database ("lazarus.sqlite") located in your profile folder. The data is encrypted to protect your privacy.

Whether that is the whole of it or not, I cannot say for I have checked no further. Others can add to it if they discover more.

Should I loose data due to time-outs or whatever, then I will post the Lazarus results here... but that may take some time since -hopefully- this problem will not occur again. 

Thanks for the pointer, Martin.