I think it is highly likely that exactly that happened.

Yeah. Anyone can look weird as hell for one instant of a freeze-frame, I’m not sure how much it means. But he definitely looks weird.

Is it really not obvious who the bottom is?

The whole thing of “they took him for Burger King” is a red herring. Cops are required to feed you. Some departments have policies about always checking if a new arrestee is hungry, and getting them some fast food if they say yes, so their attorney can’t say later that they were coerced during questioning because they had been denied food for whatever amount of time.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/russia-sims-3/

“Hey, can we make some other machines and put beer in it, like they have in Japan?”

“Are you crazy? Kids would be able to get their hands on it. Who knows what they would do.”

I think you should share this way of looking at security with some security professionals, and see what they say about it.

I know some people who recently wrote an article, for example, which said among some other things:

The simple answer is that you can’t and shouldn’t trust either free or paid VPN providers. … For some, using a VPN can be as dangerous as not using one.

And your government can seek grounds to demand access to your browsing data anytime it wants — including retroactively — which can also include demands to access data from VPN providers, defeating the very point of the privacy you sought.

Security experts consider the Tor network the gold standard of private browsing because it allows you to access the internet without censorship or surveillance.

Instead of relying on a single tunnel to hide your internet traffic, Tor works by encrypting and routing users’ internet traffic through thousands of servers around the world, shielding their activity from other servers and the outside world. Because of Tor’s implementation, no single Tor server can see your browsing data. That means even if a Tor server is compromised, the attacker still cannot access the users’ browsing data within.

Because Tor is open source, anyone can inspect its source code to ensure that it’s safe to run.

And so on.

You’re not wrong that a VPN will shield your non-web traffic, and if you’re doing something sensitive outside of HTTPS and the associated DNS, then Tor won’t help. It also won’t prevent someone from stealing your car or breaking into your house. And, the same very serious vulnerabilities that apply to free or commercial VPN providers will apply to all of that non-web traffic.

The same article with the above useful tidbits of information also includes a guide to setting up your own VPN, which can be made actually extremely secure against some threats, if you do want to secure non-web traffic. Tor is still much better at protecting your web traffic, assuming that you’re doing something for which it is suitable.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Tor is for oppressive countries where anonymity and misdirection are more important than performance. It’s literally worse than a VPN in every single way unless you’re concerned with a major country coming for your head.

So it’s… … more secure? I generally agree with this statement. The performance is worse, which makes it unsuitable for some things.

VPN is not “a browser”, it’s a network stack. It is separate from whatever you use for a browser. If you use Tor, you still use a browser.

Yes, which makes it kind of silly that you originally highlighted a vulnerability in the browser as a problem with Tor. Tor is also a network stack, but it’s most often used through a bundled-in specific Tor browser, which sometimes has vulnerabilities. Most VPNs don’t bundle a browser, but the browser that’s using the VPN still sometimes has vulnerabilities. They stand in exactly the same relationship, in terms of vulnerabilities in the browser. Neither one is better than the other. That’s the point that I was making. I can absolutely assure you that I understand the technologies involved.

Actually, I should have said specifically: It is true that Tor is slower and unsuitable for some applications, streaming and torrenting being two of them. It was more your statement that it is somehow less secure that I was disagreeing with.

VPN-using browsers

VPN is not “a browser”

Diesel-burning cars

Diesel is not “a car”

See how language works? You need to relax man.

I typed up a long sarcastic response as to why this isn’t true, but I think I’m going to let you keep believing these things. If you think VPN-using browsers do not have vulnerabilities that need updates to fix actively exploited vulnerabilities, or that data is protected between the exit node of a VPN and the end path, then I’m going to let you keep thinking those things. I’ll never stand between a person and their dreams.

I like how it started with “lol the car ID has the wrong number of digits” and keeps evolving to the point of sawing cars in half, the car that runs on recycled grease, pure madness.

You shouldn’t use it for torrenting

True.

it’s frequently targeted by intelligence agencies for IP unmasking

I would take issue with “frequently,” in the grand scheme of things, but yes. It is a sufficient level of protection that state intelligence agencies have to have specific methods, which sometimes work and sometimes don’t, to try to specifically attack one specific actor on Tor if they care enough to do it. In contrast to a VPN, which any bumbling fuckhead in more or less any jurisdiction can generally defeat with a single subpeona, and even a fairly stupid intelligence agency can defeat without blinking.

Tor sucks

Your axioms don’t add up to your theorem. There are cases where a VPN is better, torrenting being one of them, that part is true.

You made me a little nostalgic, reminding me of when reddit was good. Right around that timeframe was the last days of when it was a human place.

https://aroundincircles.net/tales-from-a-dishonest-used-car-dealership-stories/

Almost every creature that lives in a harsh environment understands about looking out for your buddies. The next day, it might be you snapped into the trap. Allies are a precious thing. A lot of people prominent in our society have forgotten, but the rats have not, nor many of the people, either.

Remember this when they start deporting your neighbors next year.

The exact same strategy as the parents using the same slang as their kids so it’ll lose its impact and the kids will abandon it. I love it.

Yeah the whole logic of “If I protect my privacy effectively, I won’t be able to use Google services anymore! O woe” is a little bit strange to me.

I suspect that they have a crew that does general maintenance, and they had to allocate the crew to go remove the googly eyes, and they semi-honestly added up the salary of that crew for whatever number of days they had to get allocated to googly eye removal duty. I think it’s unlikely that they had to hire a special contractor or spend $1,500 on a specific googly eye removal reagent.

Yeah. If there a better way to enshrine sticking googly eyes on statues as an absolutely unshakeable part of your local culture, I don’t know it.

You don’t own the world, man. You just live in it. You don’t get to demand what people are going to do to their public spaces just because someone gave you an office to sit in for a little while.

I like how the article boils down to, “Except for some isolated use cases, Tor is far superior to a VPN in both cost and safety,” and a lot of the comments boil down to “YEAH VPNS ARE GREAT GET A VPN.”

It is okay to read the article before writing a comment, guys. In some circles, it’s even encouraged, because you might learn something.