What happened to Tor?

Question

I downloaded Tor last night. All of a sudden, I started hearing that half of Onion was being shut down. I went on the hidden wiki and read the OnionNews and people were freaking out and giving each other advice on how not to get caught and people complaining that Tor was going to end. What the hell is happening? All I heard that some guy got arrested for distributing Child Pornography.

Answer 1

Tor is not going to shut down. The flaw was with Firefox (Windows only) not with the way Tor works.



The US government created a script that will reveal your identity. They have been using this flaw for a while.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/08/freedom-hosting/



I recommend to not use Tor on your every day OS. Use Liberte Linux or TAILS on a usb.

http://dee.su/liberte

https://tails.boum.org/



Tor corrected this flaw in a recent update.

Answer 2

From what I've heard from the news, Freedom Hosting was compromised and not the Tor Network entirely. The founder of Freedom Hosting was caught and Child Pornography was found in their servers and Irish court said they(the hosters) were facilitating the proliferation of this pornography. The problem was a security vulnerabilty in Firefox 17 and Tor wants to fix the problem. Tor says it is not responsible for these acts and intricacies. People should be careful.



It is still undefined if Tor is going to shut down. It's an assumption but it might not be true. You see, you can use the service without going to the popularized "Deep Web". The services generates a proxy IP to you to access content anonymously but that doesn't only include the non-indexed pages.

Answer 3

Here's the TOR blog about recent developments:

TOR (via Freedom Hosting) hacked with JavaScript implant. Important read.

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/hidden-services-current-events-and-freedom-hosting

Has some related info to JavaScript & some contrib's ideas on how to deflect the mischief.

Answer 4

It got hacked by the Schutzstaffel. You know... our beloved "protective squadron".