[kwlug-disc] netalyzr/ispgeeks interpreting [was: Re: Reliable Broadband speed test]

[Kyle Spaans]

On Sun, Mar 6, 2011 at 9:39 AM, unsolicited <unsolicited at swiz.ca> wrote:
> Any particular experience, or truth in advertising?

Yes, TOR is fairly large academic project run by some serious crypto
people. In fact one of my profs at UW is on the core TOR development
team. They are continuously coming up with ways to break their own
stuff, and then fix it.

> e.g. I have recently been coming across a lot of 'anonymous bit
> torrent' offers. And, nearby, expositions on the fallacies of such claims.
>
> caveat emptor is coming to mind, on all of this.

Indeed, a current problem with TOR and open research area is that a
lot of people seem to think that running bittorrent over TOR is a good
idea, which is severely degrading the speeds of the TOR network. That
combined with a shortage of TOR nodes in the network means that TOR is
"a bit slow" (aka, unusable for anything real-time, and difficult to
even browse the web if you're impatient).

So in conclusion, I would say that TOR does exactly what it claims to
do. The only problems is that it could be doing it faster, and they
are working on it. :P I hope that answers your questions?

(Disclaimer: this is all hearsay, I've never actually used TOR myself.)