"Everything that is expected from an ordinary weapon is expected from a silent weapon by its creators, but only in its own manner of functioning.
It shoots situations, instead of bullets; propelled by data processing, instead of chemical reaction (explosion); originating from bits of data, instead of grains of gunpowder; from a computer, instead of a gun; operated by a computer programmer, instead of a marksman; under the orders of a banking magnate, instead of a military general.
It makes no obvious explosive noises, causes no obvious physical or mental injuries, and does not obviously interfere with anyone's daily social life.
Yet it makes an unmistakable "noise," causes unmistakable physical and mental damage, and unmistakably interferes with the daily social life, i.e., unmistakable to a trained observer, one who knows what to look for.
The public cannot comprehend this weapon, and therefore cannot believe that they are being attacked and subdued by a weapon.
The public might instinctively feel that something is wrong, but that is because of the technical nature of the silent weapon, they cannot express their feeling in a rational way, or handle the problem with intelligence. Therefore, they do not know how to cry for help, and do not know how to associate with others to defend themselves against it.
When a silent weapon is applied gradually, the public adjusts/adapts to its presence and learns to tolerate its encroachment on their lives until the pressure (psychological via economic) becomes too great and they crack up.
Therefore, the silent weapon is a type of biological warfare. It attacks the vitality, options, and mobility of the individuals of a society by knowing, understanding, manipulating, and attacking their sources of natural and social energy, and their physical, mental, and emotional strengths and weaknesses."
That wasn't meant to be an argument against other privacy protecting technologies. I'll take them all. Although you can't just compare apples to apples when you speak of close sources technology. I applaud apple for the long held stance of privacy protections.
And to be fair, tor comes at the price of speed. But convince isn't the only thing in the math equation here. Privacy basically boils down to a three part equation these days with the variables being Speed/Convenience.
A lot of that speed and convince can be made up for with being familiar with the tools and adapting to a new norm. The actual network speed isn't really that bad comparatively.
These are the origins of Tor yes. The same technology that protects the spy, protects the journalist, or the citizen whose government blocked them, or placed a wall of ID verification checks.
Everyone should study the basics on a server backend and full stack web.
If you can master what it takes to design and run your site on localhost....you are literally one step away from sharing it with anyone on the planet who has internet access for zero dollars because of the power of tor, and the global network that supports it.
The reality is, there is no gate there, just the knowledge of how to do it.
Tor is first and foremost a router.
Sites that block tor IP's do happen, this is because of the dual use nature of the technology. Its also well suited for abuse.
Im sure a lot of people know about tor on this site...but let me remind everyone.
Tor is not for criminals. It's for you and me. And happens to be good enough that criminals use it too. This is the two sided nature of technology.
Tor is a networks of peers across the globe volunteering their network bandwidth to support people under oppression by their government.
The amount of privacy that can be gained from tor is proportional to the amount of people using it. The more that people utilize the technology, the more that everyone looks the same, and protects the people that need it the most.
Tor enables me to say no to these things and carry on, without permission.
The world does want this. Opus capabilities, in a box, securely tunneled to my family and I utilizing the resources I already have available to me which is, energy + network.