To assume that Tor has been able to make security advancements at the same or a better rate as interested parties have been able to break it is putting a lot of faith in a dangerous assumption.
Just don’t do shit that garners attention?
Don’t plot the overthrow of governments, considering they’re not really that oppressive these days.
Don’t try to buy illegal shit.
Don’t do things that require you to hide. If you want to remain anon, you can practice standard opsec on a non anonymized network just fine.
Again it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of thing. If there were hundreds of thousands of Tor nodes on the internet, I might well consider running one myself to contribute to a project I feel is worthwhile. But one of under 7000? No thanks, man.
That’s the problem with Tor in a nutshell. It’s unpopular, it’s slow, and that all feeds on itself. If it were more popular it would be much more effective, and faster, and more people would use it, and more people would run nodes, which would make it more effective, and faster, which would make more people use it… etc, etc.
Neither of what you mentioned provides the least bit of privacy, in all cases you can be easily fingerprinted thanks to browser fingerprinting and a single entity can determine your whole traffic. And no “using Tor” isn’t synonymous with “plotting to overthrow the government”, “buying drugs”, or similar things.
Drugs and terrorists probably don’t use much bandwidth, as a proportion of the whole. My guess is a very large proportion of users are there to score drugs, but most of the bandwidth is child porn. Obviously there is no data to substantiate any of that given the nature of Tor.
Overwhelmingly people buying drugs. Tor is a real boon there in a harm prevention sense. Instead of scoring drugs of dubious untested quality from some scumbag in a dangerous cash transaction, you buy online from an established dealer with tons of user reviews under his product just like Amazon and get high quality product delivered to your door.
Legality aside, I basically think the drug markets are a good thing for that very reason. Where they fall astray is when guys like DPR resort to violence to protect themselves. There’s no way to frame the narrative of murder for hire as “harm prevention”.
Drugs/CP are mostly only found on onion sites, and guess how much onion services represent from the overall Tor traffic? I’ll let you do the math: compare this with this. (Besides Drugs/CP are only found in a tiny fraction of the total number of onion services) So that “most Tor traffic is drugs/CP” is completely far from reality.
By the way I find that the discussion has a bit stretched far from the OP, we’re discussing an addon by the Tor Project that gives you a one click way to help censored users and to put your unused bandwidth to good use; and not whether Tor is perfect.
Thanks for those links and the education. You’re right, my guess was completely off-base. Based on those numbers, something under 2% of Tor traffic goes to .onion sites, and I agree with your statement that the seriously illegal stuff would be hosted there.