The ubiquitous use of encryption on the internet took some time to happen, there was a time when the US government defined them as munitions and claimed export restrictions, and famously the PGP project broke this via the First Amendment, by literally printing the source code on paper and then posting it, it became recognised that code, and encryption, are protected speech.

With ubiquitous 128 and 256 bit AES encryption now in use by default, the content of messages is secure. However, the volume of messages and endpoints of signals are still useful intelligence data, enabling state level actors to attack internet users and violate their privacy and threaten their safety.

Protecting against this high level attack the main network currently doing this work is the Tor network. However, this system has many flaws, and in recent times its centralised relay registry has come under sustained attack by DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks.

One of the big problems that with this network is its weak network effect. There is no incentive for anyone to run nodes on the network, and worse, the most common use case is tunneling back out of the network to anonymize location, is largely abused and led to a lot of automated block systems arising on many internet services to prevent this abuse.

fin

notes:

([a-zA-z0-9\_\-\.][a-zA-z0-9\/\_\-\.]+)\:([0-9]+) is a regex that matches the relative file paths in the log output. $1 and $2 from this are the relative path and the line number.