TOR and anonymity -- an excellent "Horizon" one-hour documentary

[Darren Dirt]

I watched this during lunch (in Chrome at 1.5x speed; 2x speed was hard to understand much of the narration).

There's brief but information-filled interviews with and discussion about the [essential] inventor of TOR, and some guys involved in its practicial development and deployment and promotion, and then there's a quick but enlightening summary about some other iconic events like Wikileaks and Silk Road and Bitcoin... It's a very FULL hour!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXajND7BQzk "Inside The Dark Web"


In the final 10 minutes, Eugene Kaspersky shows up and what he suggests is the future was quite surprising to me, considering "security" is his focus. He basically is saying "privacy is a thing of the past, get over it, let's move forward into authentic identities etc." But then Tim Berners-Lee rebuts this perspective... saying (like Snowden) that personal cryptography is really the only defense and a must for the future of the internet for personal protection.



If you like this kind of "Deep Thoughts with very efficient delivery of heavy content" (i.e. very high signal:noise ratio, time well spent, like TED Talks but less filler!) there's plenty more at...
https://www.youtube.com/user/DocFilmStoryTV/videos
e.g. "Are We Real?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJt3CTGuFVs#t=1m32s <-- the audio is messed up the first 90 seconds

[Mr. Analog]

The trouble with an information system like the web is if you interact with it in any way you become information yourself and there really is no stopping that, heck, even if you DON'T interact with it other information creates you by proxy (tagged in a photo, public records going online, etc, etc). So really you have to choose whether or not you represent "you" or you leave a "shadow" you, and I think that this is really something people will have to learn to accept (as Kaspersky says).

That said there will always be ways to communicate securely, and there is always going to be a need to have that ability (for business if nothing else.) As long as those needs exist a means will be devised, much like TOR itself.

TOR was originally developed by the US Navy for protecting US intelligence communication online.