Ever wanted to post something online anonymously for all to see? Tor2Web might be an application for you.
Wired’s Threat Level has made an interesting find today – Tor2Web. The concept comes from the anonymizing concept of the Tor network (AKA the Union Router) which anonymizes web surfers and prevents information about them from being recorded. More from the report:
Aaron Swartz, one of the founders of Reddit, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner have teamed up to provide users with a new service that gives them access to anonymized content posted through the Tor network.
The article says that the concept of anonymously posting content through the TOR network has been on the back-burner for years, but recently brought back to life over the fact that Wikileaks, a website devoted to people who either want to publish suppressed information or want to access suppressed information (often reporters), was facing legal pressure to take content down.
Since it’s based off of Tor technology, chances are, the content would be difficult to trace back to the source since it’s obfuscated through different routers. It’s unclear whether or not the content would be hosted on multiple servers as is the case with ThePirateBay after they got raided.
An interesting part was located further down the article:
The service is new, so there are a few drawbacks. There are only a couple hundred hidden sites currently available to peruse (many of them are file-sharing and storage services) but Swartz hopes that number will grow as more users become aware that they can publish information anonymously through Tor.
So it appears as though that not only is file-sharing possible, but is already being used as such. Anonymizing file-sharing has been an extremely difficult task since it’s either slow or not popular enough to hold many sought after files to become popular in the first place. Still, with the MPAA hoping to enact world-wide surveillance on the internet, such a system may ultimately prove popular. Here’s hoping that the founders don’t wind up on the wrong end of a lawsuit as a result of all of this.
In the mean time, with the advent of BitTorrent, eMule and MegaUpload/Rapidshare, there’s plenty of users happily file-sharing through other means, so it’s unlikely that Tor2Web will become a popular file-sharing means.
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