Comment by 👻 darkghost
Re: "Are we making a "dark web"? According to the media, the "…"
Small net, yes. AlterNet? Sure. Dark net? Only in dark mode.
Mar 08 · 2 months ago
2 Later Comments ↓
🐦 wasolili [...] · Mar 08 at 19:37:
@norayr I think you're thinking of the Freedom Hosting takedown. Freedom Hosting was a free web hosting service for hidden services over a decade ago. A lot hidden services at the time used it, including some that hosted illegal things like child abuse, which was supposed to be against Freedom Hosting's rules but the guy who ran it turned a blind eye to it and ignored it when people reported it to him. When law enforcement seized Freedom Hosting after investigating one of those hidden services, they pushed a javascript exploit to many (maybe every) service Freedom Hosting hosted.
i coudn't help but think tor team was asked to delay the update for that case because of a known to agencies bug.
You're misinformed here. The attack targeted out-of-date Tor Browser users. The issue was in Firefox prior to Firefox 17.0.7esr (released June 25th). The Tor Browser Bundle was updated to Firefox 17.0.7esr the next day, June 26. The exploit was executed in August, so the only people who were vulnerable were people who hadn't updated their Tor Browser Bundle in over a month.
— https://blog.torproject.org/tor-security-advisory-old-tor-browser-bundles-vulnerable/
i remember a time when tor browser was based on firefox 17. i didn't use it, i just used firefox with enabled tor proxy sometimes. but my friend who was using official tor browser was wondering, it's now firefox 21, then 22, then 23, why doesn't tor team update the firefox version of the tor browser?
They use the extended support release (esr) versions, which was Firefox 17 until Firefox 24 came out. Those are the releases that get long-term support (including security updates) that are intended to be used by projects like Tor.
@wasolili, thank you for such comprehensive reply and information!
Original Post
Are we making a "dark web"? According to the media, the "dark web" is some place where all the terrorists and paedophiles hang out. I don't see any sign of that here. But, less sensationally, the dark web is that set of servers that aren't visible on regular web searches, and need specialist encryption techniques to access. So is Gemini space a "dark web", at least in that latter sense? And, if so, why isn't it (so far as I know) full of terrorists and paedophiles? Just wondering.