Does Tor Provide More Benefit or Harm? New Paper Says It Depends
upstart writes in with an IRC submission:
Does Tor provide more benefit or harm? New paper says it depends:
Researchers on Monday unveiled new estimates that attempt to measure the potential harms and benefits of Tor. They found that, worldwide, almost 7 percent of Tor users connect to hidden services, which the researchers contend are disproportionately more likely to offer illicit services or content compared with normal Internet sites. Connections to hidden services were significantly higher in countries rated as more politically "free" relative to those that are "partially free" or "not free."
Specifically, the fraction of Tor users globally accessing hidden sites is 6.7, a relatively small proportion. Those users, however, aren't evenly distributed geographically. In countries with regimes rated "not free" by this scoring from an organization called Freedom House, access to hidden services was just 4.8 percent. In "free" countries, the proportion jumped to 7.8 percent.
[...] The researchers-from Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia; Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York; and Cyber Espion in Portsmouth, United Kingdom-acknowledged that the estimates aren't perfect, In part, that's because the estimates are based on the unprovable assumption that the overwhelming majority of Dark Web sites provide illicit content or services.
The paper, however, argues that the findings can be useful for policymakers who are trying to gauge the benefits of Tor relative to the harms it creates. The researchers view the results through the lenses of the 2015 paper titled The Dark Web Dilemma: Tor, Anonymity and Online Policing and On Liberty, the essay published by English philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1859.
The Tor Project points out in an email, presumably to ArsTrchnica, that the findings are flawed because they assume every .onion address is used for illicit purposes. Many sites offer a .onion address as an alternative way of reaching their content, including SoylentNews.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.