DEF CON A Tor Project grandee sought to correct some misconceptions about the anonymizing network during a presentation at the DEF CON hacking convention in Las Vegas on Friday.
Roger Dingledine, one of the three founders of the
Tor Project, castigated journos for mischaracterizing the pro-privacy system as a bolthole exclusively used by drug dealers and pedophiles to hide from the authorities.
In fact, he said, only three per cent of Tor users connect to hidden services, suggesting the vast majority of folks on the network are using it to anonymously browse public websites for completely legit purposes. In other words, netizens – from journalists to activists to normal peeps – use Tor to mask their identities from website owners, and it's not just underworld villains.
Dingledine even went as far as saying the dark web – a landscape of websites concealed within networks like Tor – is so insignificant, it can be discounted.
“There is basically no dark web. It doesn’t exist,” he told his DEF CON audience. “It’s only a very few webpages.”
