What is Tor/Dark Web/Onions?
July 6, 2024 3:17 AM Subscribe
I pay for baseball but I was out of market. All i wanted to do was listen, but i didn't setup my VPN. i thought Tor/Onions/Dark Web would get me through. i am now as confused as ever as what it is for. i read some Reddit posts on it and it seems to cross between censorship avoidance and Edward Snowden type leaking to selling drugs and hitmen. I just wanted to listen to baseball, what's the deal with this thing?
Look I did Usenet and Torrents and private torrent sites when I was a kid. This is more confusing as can be. Is it a one to one thing where you have to 'know someone' or is there just I need time to commit to get pass the BS. For the record I did get "caught" using my VPN and received a nasty letter. I wrote to the owner of the franchise and explained the situation and he told me to in no uncertain terms to ignore it and and he wished he did not have to abide by market rules and enjoyed fans like myself.
My question is there a "dark web" guide for people who know what they are doing from a tech perspective. Or maybe something easier? Again I'm not interested in drugs, felonies, etc. If it costs me $2/mo to get all sports and not have to worry about my personal VPN I'll put it on a prepaid card.
Again, i'm not listening to or watching things I don't already pay for it is just silly out of market regulations that even team owners disagree with. I loaded a Tor browser, went through the "Bible" and came out even more confused. If this it to believed I can't imagine it is too hard to figure out. What's the plain english on how this works?
In case this comes off as illegal: I did consult a lawyer who said basically copyright law is complex and a signed letter from an owner wouldn't even go anywhere, That said I'm curious as to what's going on here.
Look I did Usenet and Torrents and private torrent sites when I was a kid. This is more confusing as can be. Is it a one to one thing where you have to 'know someone' or is there just I need time to commit to get pass the BS. For the record I did get "caught" using my VPN and received a nasty letter. I wrote to the owner of the franchise and explained the situation and he told me to in no uncertain terms to ignore it and and he wished he did not have to abide by market rules and enjoyed fans like myself.
My question is there a "dark web" guide for people who know what they are doing from a tech perspective. Or maybe something easier? Again I'm not interested in drugs, felonies, etc. If it costs me $2/mo to get all sports and not have to worry about my personal VPN I'll put it on a prepaid card.
Again, i'm not listening to or watching things I don't already pay for it is just silly out of market regulations that even team owners disagree with. I loaded a Tor browser, went through the "Bible" and came out even more confused. If this it to believed I can't imagine it is too hard to figure out. What's the plain english on how this works?
In case this comes off as illegal: I did consult a lawyer who said basically copyright law is complex and a signed letter from an owner wouldn't even go anywhere, That said I'm curious as to what's going on here.
I don't have a solution, but I do have a couple comments that might help the discussion.
My experience is the big media companies can identify the sites VPNs use, and can block them. So, for example, I've been unable to watch BBC content from Connecticut vis the Malwarebytes VPN, no matter what the ads promise. I imagine there is constant cat and mouse on this. There are probably companies that specialize in anti-VPN defense.
I believe the MLB app is designed to block games in the home area as protection for local broadcast media. To to that, they would need a pretty stroke defense against VPNs.
It used to be possible to hear 50,000 Watt AM radio stations halfway across the country at night. I think I don't even own an AM radio anymore, aside from the one in my car.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:08 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
My experience is the big media companies can identify the sites VPNs use, and can block them. So, for example, I've been unable to watch BBC content from Connecticut vis the Malwarebytes VPN, no matter what the ads promise. I imagine there is constant cat and mouse on this. There are probably companies that specialize in anti-VPN defense.
I believe the MLB app is designed to block games in the home area as protection for local broadcast media. To to that, they would need a pretty stroke defense against VPNs.
It used to be possible to hear 50,000 Watt AM radio stations halfway across the country at night. I think I don't even own an AM radio anymore, aside from the one in my car.
posted by SemiSalt at 5:08 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
The US Navy developed The Onion Router, tor, for those times when your nuclear deterrent submarines surface and need to exchange traffic without revealing where their first hop onto the internet is.
It has two kinds of nodes, relay nodes which route messages and exit nodes which interface to normal services. The intent is that the relay nodes split up TCP streams across multiple different routes, each relay node hiding the previous and future hops from othe relay nodes so you can't recreate the path taken, and entry/exit nodes that the protocol tunnels to when sending inbound traffic and, out of which, parts of TCP streams emerge in parts so that you have to work hard to capture a whole stream (even encrypted, an adversary might save it for later analysis and cracking).
The Dark Web is anything that has its servers starting on an onion-routed network. Each node has an address that's a cryptographic hash, and you can run services that are only visible by those hashes. (The Linux client adopted .onion domain to pass http & tls traffic to your local tor connection, but above that is the hash for the service.)
You don't want the varied latency of tor for streaming audio and video.
What's happening with the MalwareBytes VPN tunnel is that its remote ends are known and on a block list. You can create ad-hoc VPN tunnels to literally any cloud endpoint with a puppet script like algo that sets up a VM in a cloud provider location you choose and configures a Wireguard VPN tunnel so you appear to the internet to be at whichever cloud endpoint you choose.
It's that "appearing to be" than might make a difference to region-locked sites. If they don't have all the IP ranges for cloud providers blocked, you should be able to pay transit charges for the data and stream what you want to stream.
posted by k3ninho at 5:31 AM on July 6 [6 favorites]
It has two kinds of nodes, relay nodes which route messages and exit nodes which interface to normal services. The intent is that the relay nodes split up TCP streams across multiple different routes, each relay node hiding the previous and future hops from othe relay nodes so you can't recreate the path taken, and entry/exit nodes that the protocol tunnels to when sending inbound traffic and, out of which, parts of TCP streams emerge in parts so that you have to work hard to capture a whole stream (even encrypted, an adversary might save it for later analysis and cracking).
The Dark Web is anything that has its servers starting on an onion-routed network. Each node has an address that's a cryptographic hash, and you can run services that are only visible by those hashes. (The Linux client adopted .onion domain to pass http & tls traffic to your local tor connection, but above that is the hash for the service.)
You don't want the varied latency of tor for streaming audio and video.
What's happening with the MalwareBytes VPN tunnel is that its remote ends are known and on a block list. You can create ad-hoc VPN tunnels to literally any cloud endpoint with a puppet script like algo that sets up a VM in a cloud provider location you choose and configures a Wireguard VPN tunnel so you appear to the internet to be at whichever cloud endpoint you choose.
It's that "appearing to be" than might make a difference to region-locked sites. If they don't have all the IP ranges for cloud providers blocked, you should be able to pay transit charges for the data and stream what you want to stream.
posted by k3ninho at 5:31 AM on July 6 [6 favorites]
Back in to note that the comments about the MLB app probably should referenced MLB.TV, though they probably have the same restrictions.
I did take a look at the restrictions on the NY Mets AM radio.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:05 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
I did take a look at the restrictions on the NY Mets AM radio.
posted by SemiSalt at 6:05 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
For the purposes you describe TOR acts the same as a VPN. Your traffic goes into the tunnel and emerges at an exit node somewhere. At this point many VPN exit nodes are known and blocked, and the same may be true of TOR exits.
Internals notwithstanding, I don’t think you really want what TOR has to offer. Take a look and spinning up your own simple vpn exit node in something like digital ocean. It won’t be on any blocked lists that the baseball server uses.
posted by bug138 at 7:24 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
Internals notwithstanding, I don’t think you really want what TOR has to offer. Take a look and spinning up your own simple vpn exit node in something like digital ocean. It won’t be on any blocked lists that the baseball server uses.
posted by bug138 at 7:24 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
Due to MLB's esoteric "territory" rules, they have very specific geo-blocking rules. You need a paid VPN to bypass them, and sometimes, even that doesn't work.
Tor / Darkweb / Onion is a whole other animal altogether. While it works, at least in concept, to VPN, the main difference is Darkweb does NOT surface in regular Internet. When you activate a Tor browser, you are generally accessing a Darkweb server, so the traffic stays on the darkweb. The only portion that's on the regular Internet... is your Tor browser's access to your local Onion router.
When you use a VPN, you're using regular Internet to get to the VPN, and on the other end, the traffic exits to find the destination server, also on the regular internet. Then the reverse happens.
Tor will NOT help you bypass Geoblocking because it's designed to access DarkWeb servers. The server you want to access (MLB) is on the regular Internet.
posted by kschang at 7:44 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
Tor / Darkweb / Onion is a whole other animal altogether. While it works, at least in concept, to VPN, the main difference is Darkweb does NOT surface in regular Internet. When you activate a Tor browser, you are generally accessing a Darkweb server, so the traffic stays on the darkweb. The only portion that's on the regular Internet... is your Tor browser's access to your local Onion router.
When you use a VPN, you're using regular Internet to get to the VPN, and on the other end, the traffic exits to find the destination server, also on the regular internet. Then the reverse happens.
Tor will NOT help you bypass Geoblocking because it's designed to access DarkWeb servers. The server you want to access (MLB) is on the regular Internet.
posted by kschang at 7:44 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
When I ran into this with college football, we resorted to listening to the local radio station that broadcasts games via the station's webpage. That may not be an option if there's no local radio broadcast but that's a free and simple way to listen legally. I don't recall if there's was a geoblock or not - it was a cable game and we don't have cable so the radio was the next best choice.
posted by fiercekitten at 7:55 AM on July 6
posted by fiercekitten at 7:55 AM on July 6
When I ran into this with college football, we resorted to listening to the local radio station that broadcasts games via the station's webpage.
Similar for me - I'm in my baseball team's geographical region so I haven't tested out whether geoblocking is an issue, but I just got to the site of the station that's the official broadcast partner of my team and I can stream radio from there. I'm also 3000 miles away from my alma mater, and I can just go to their athletics site and stream audio games directly from there with no geoblocking issues at all.
posted by LionIndex at 8:22 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
Similar for me - I'm in my baseball team's geographical region so I haven't tested out whether geoblocking is an issue, but I just got to the site of the station that's the official broadcast partner of my team and I can stream radio from there. I'm also 3000 miles away from my alma mater, and I can just go to their athletics site and stream audio games directly from there with no geoblocking issues at all.
posted by LionIndex at 8:22 AM on July 6 [1 favorite]
I pay for MLB.TV and a Smart DNS subscription from Unlocator. The DNS is something like four bucks a month. I just point my router to their DNS and I can watch like 95% of the games on MLB.TV that would normally be blacked out. There are some games that air on Apple/Prime/other streaming services that aren't available from MLB.TV and I just resort to a third-party pirate stream.
posted by Diskeater at 9:29 AM on July 6 [2 favorites]
posted by Diskeater at 9:29 AM on July 6 [2 favorites]
What's the plain english on how this works?
Connecting via TOR is like connecting over three nested, randomly selected VPNs.
When you use a commercial VPN, the VPN operator can see both your incoming connection requests and the outgoing connections it's making on your behalf. If your main reason for using a VPN is privacy protection, this isn't optimal; you're simply trusting a VPN operator, rather than your own ISP, to protect your privacy. If you're paying for the VPN service this is reasonable - most paid VPN services do little to no access logging - but you have no cryptography-based reason for that trust.
When you're using TOR, nobody - not your ISP, not any of the TOR node operators - can see both who you are and who you're connecting to at the same time, at least not on the basis of examining the headers or content of any network traffic. Closest anybody can get is by monitoring a bunch of hosts known to be operating as TOR entry and exit nodes, and looking for timing correlations between traffic bursts into and out of entry and exit nodes.
If you're using the TOR Browser to connect to ordinary web servers, you can see the IP addresses and their associated countries for the entry, intermediate and exit nodes currently used for any given connection, and ask the browser to choose a different random set of those, but you get no direct control over where exactly the exit node will be. So you can use TOR to bypass geoblocking, but just as for a simple VPN, the service you're connecting to might well recognize a TOR exit node as special based on its traffic patterns and block it explicitly.
The so-called Dark Web is just web servers whose IP addresses don't have corresponding DNS records. TOR has an internal alternative to DNS for resolving hashes of IP address and public key pairs back to those pairs, and this gets used to create URLs under a .onion pseudo top-level domain that's interpreted specially by TOR clients (.onion is officially reserved by IANA, guaranteeing that it is not and never will be an actual DNS top-level domain). When a TOR browser connects to .onion services, it does so in a way that doesn't reveal the server IP addresses to the browser; IP address resolution is done inside a TOR relay node that doesn't know which client device requested it.
It may well be that there are .onion services offering live sports coverage over TOR, but if you're already paying for a VPN that you know to be satisfactory at working around geoblocking to get access to streams that you're also already paying for, the VPN will probably work better than TOR. Streaming over TOR is, in my experience, usually not smooth.
posted by flabdablet at 4:11 AM on July 7 [2 favorites]
Connecting via TOR is like connecting over three nested, randomly selected VPNs.
When you use a commercial VPN, the VPN operator can see both your incoming connection requests and the outgoing connections it's making on your behalf. If your main reason for using a VPN is privacy protection, this isn't optimal; you're simply trusting a VPN operator, rather than your own ISP, to protect your privacy. If you're paying for the VPN service this is reasonable - most paid VPN services do little to no access logging - but you have no cryptography-based reason for that trust.
When you're using TOR, nobody - not your ISP, not any of the TOR node operators - can see both who you are and who you're connecting to at the same time, at least not on the basis of examining the headers or content of any network traffic. Closest anybody can get is by monitoring a bunch of hosts known to be operating as TOR entry and exit nodes, and looking for timing correlations between traffic bursts into and out of entry and exit nodes.
If you're using the TOR Browser to connect to ordinary web servers, you can see the IP addresses and their associated countries for the entry, intermediate and exit nodes currently used for any given connection, and ask the browser to choose a different random set of those, but you get no direct control over where exactly the exit node will be. So you can use TOR to bypass geoblocking, but just as for a simple VPN, the service you're connecting to might well recognize a TOR exit node as special based on its traffic patterns and block it explicitly.
The so-called Dark Web is just web servers whose IP addresses don't have corresponding DNS records. TOR has an internal alternative to DNS for resolving hashes of IP address and public key pairs back to those pairs, and this gets used to create URLs under a .onion pseudo top-level domain that's interpreted specially by TOR clients (.onion is officially reserved by IANA, guaranteeing that it is not and never will be an actual DNS top-level domain). When a TOR browser connects to .onion services, it does so in a way that doesn't reveal the server IP addresses to the browser; IP address resolution is done inside a TOR relay node that doesn't know which client device requested it.
It may well be that there are .onion services offering live sports coverage over TOR, but if you're already paying for a VPN that you know to be satisfactory at working around geoblocking to get access to streams that you're also already paying for, the VPN will probably work better than TOR. Streaming over TOR is, in my experience, usually not smooth.
posted by flabdablet at 4:11 AM on July 7 [2 favorites]
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posted by Lanark at 4:31 AM on July 6 [4 favorites]