What's up everybody?
What's up, what's up, what's up?
Freedom Tech.
Alright, I'm just checking here.
Welcome everybody to Freedom Tech weekend.
Let's make sure that the stream is live.
Going to find my channel here.
Okay.
How Tor enables borderless browsing.
Okay, we're live on YouTube.
We'll assume that X is working and that that stream are working.
Okay, welcome everybody.
Today we are talking about the Tor network or the onion router, which is what Tor stands for.
So we will dive right in. I'm going to let people just have a few moments here to join as we start talking about it.
Maybe I'll pop over real quick and check to make sure that Zap.Stream is working.
There we go.
Let's see, zap.stream.
Because, you know, we love being there, too.
Looks like we're up and live.
All right, we're working on zap.stream.
Feel free to join the chat.
I'm going to keep the chat on zap.stream open as well on the side over here.
And then I've got the other chats for X and YouTube open.
So if you are joining from any of those, x, YouTube, zap.stream, go ahead and chat and we'll see it.
Your chat messages will be part of the show.
You will help direct and guide what we talk about and how this is.
I want this to be interactive.
I really enjoy interactive live streams.
I think that they make for much better content.
And really, we are doing this as a community here to learn about Freedom Tech tools that we can use and explore every weekend so we can one by one decouple our lives from systems that are captured, permissioned, that are proprietary, closed, and really systems that own our data instead of us owning it ourselves.
That's what we're doing here week in and week out at Freedom Tech Weekend.
If you are new to Freedom Tech Weekend, we have a backlog of episodes.
This is episode eight, so it's a fairly new show.
We've been doing this for about two months now, although I've been podcasting about Freedom
Tech for over two years.
I started a couple years ago, have taken some on and off breaks, but I've started up recently
again doing this weekly format where it's actually a live stream coupled with archive
so that people can go back and check out the old stuff.
And what we do is we pick one tool.
It can be an app, open source project, you know, some kind of freedom tech tool.
We show it off and play around with it here for 30 minutes.
We learn about the history of the project, maybe what security tradeoffs are being made,
privacy tradeoffs, and then we stick it in the archive.
And the hope is that you will hear something today that you can play around with during
your free time this weekend.
Okay, well welcome to all of our listeners. We've got six people joining here on the streams.
Welcome. Again, jump in the live chat and comment away. Today we are learning about
Tor, the Onion Router, the Tor browser, the Tor network. It goes by many names
and many people have heard of this. Some have used it, some haven't. You might have heard of it
because it was used to describe criminal activity
or nefarious things or unsavory behavior that happens.
One of the places where Tor really became famous
was on that show Mr. Robot.
That was, what was that, like 10 years ago or so?
Mr. Robot was a really interesting, cool show.
And in the very first episode, the very first scene,
Tor is brought up as a way that he was able to catch this guy
who was exchanging really unsavory content online.
And he talked about an actual exploit that he did
in the Onion Router network.
So let's talk about what that is, Onion Router.
Let's talk about what its uses are.
It really is a tool for freedom.
It is a tool for anyone, regular people.
It doesn't have to be criminals.
It is a tool that allows people
to use the internet freely.
effectively regardless of what jurisdiction you are in the firewalls that might be in place
imposed upon you by governments or organizations that are present and
yeah so yes there are tools that are very productive to get used by good people and
people for bad purposes that's just the way life is and so let's examine this really powerful
tool for the good uses that it can have rather than letting it be dragged through the mud by
some of the bad cases that you can think of. Okay, so let's jump in. I've got like a bit of a history
that I put together here on the Tor project and so we'll go through that. What I will do is I will
share my screen and we'll kind of talk about the Tor project page as we talk
about Tor itself. So let me get my screen share going over here. Bring up my home
server that I use. Alright I've got my background going and then I want to get
my camera looking good. And we're going to change this to be a nice little oval shape.
Get myself out of the way a little bit more. There we go. If you're listening on audio,
that's totally fine. I love listening to audio archive podcasts. So welcome to my audio listeners.
What we have here on the screen is on the right side here, we've got the Tor project
and a web browser. This is the Orion web browser that we have covered on a previous episode here.
So if you want to check that out, go ahead.
And then on the left side, I've got Maple here, which is our end-to-end encrypted AI chat,
similar to ChatGPT, but privately encrypted with your own private encryption key.
So nobody but you knows what's going on with the LLM.
And we use Maple throughout here to ask questions and get better understanding.
Great.
So this is the Tor project website.
and just to give you a brief history of what you know what Tor is it it really
started as a project in the 90s and it was started by the United States
government the United States Naval Research Laboratory or NRL began
developing a system to protect online communications project was led by a few
people I'm not even try to pronounce their names but you can look them up if
you want to they made an initial prototype of the onion routing system
And in 2002, and really the early 2000s, the NRL released the source code of the system under an open source license.
And that's when the Tor project was born.
Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF, had a lot of involvement early on and is still an advocate for the Tor network, from what I can tell.
An actual Tor project independent organization was set up in the early 2000s as well.
So there's a 501c3 nonprofit organization in the United States that works to maintain and develop and push forward the TOR project.
Today, it's maintained by developers, researchers, advocates really from around the world.
So it's not just a United States-centric thing.
It was born here, but there are people around the world supporting this now.
It's funded by all sorts of organizations like in the United States, the National Science Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, as well as thousands of others, the Mozilla Foundation, community volunteers who support it as well.
They support it financially, but also they support it by contributing to the code base, testing things out, maintaining the Tor software.
And then one of the biggest parts of the community that maintains this whole project are the people who run the actual relays, run the actual software that power the network.
And we'll get into that as well.
Now, I do want to point out here that the United States government has had a huge part of giving birth to this project and the network and still has a role in it.
How deep the role is, how much, it's not fully known, but there is a lot of strong evidence that the United States government is still funding a lot of this project moving forward, including DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
DARPA has had a significant role in the development of the TOR network.
All right, so what is TOR?
Let's say that you are here today.
How many people do we have on the stream?
And let's keep watching the chat as well.
Okay, so you're here.
We have, we got 13 people on the stream.
Welcome, everybody.
If you've never heard of Tor or if someone's mentioned it and you thought,
oh, that's that thing that bad people use to do bad things online,
I'm here to tell you that it's so much more than that.
So what is Tor really and why is it so important?
Well, it's a free open source software that helps you browse the Internet anonymously and securely.
When you use the Tor browser, your internet traffic is routed through a network of volunteer-run servers,
making it difficult for anyone to track your online activities.
This is especially important for many people.
So yes, people can use it for bad things, but it's also useful for journalists, activists,
and other people who need to protect their online anonymity.
I would posit that you, as an everyday person, someone who feels like privacy is a human right,
then Tor is for you.
Okay.
I'll just shorten it down to that. How does Tor work? Well, let's walk into that. Let's take a
closer look at the technology behind this Tor network. So when you send data, you do it,
most people use it by downloading the Tor browser. So let me, I'm on the website here.
Okay. So I'm on the website here. You come, you download the Tor browser. This is how most people
get into the Tor network. And it's supported on all sorts of different platforms. Okay.
All the major ones. Now you'll notice iOS is not present. There is an app for using
Tor on iOS. It's partnered with some kind of Tor VPN. I've had mixed results over the
years trying to use Tor on iOS. So that's one reason why it's not listed here officially.
but you can look into that if you want to but you can get it for all these other major platforms
and that's great so use accordingly how you want to
but the way that it works is you open up the tor browser or you have some software that knows how
to talk to the tor network but let's just let's just say the rest of this as if you're using the
tor browser just to make it easy so it it takes your communication and it encrypts it and wraps
it in multiple layers of encryption. So it says, okay, I want to look up this website, right? I
want to go to try maple.ai. It's just up on the screen here. So I'm going to use that as an
example. I want to go to try maple.ai, right? So if I go to my browser and say try maple.ai,
I'm just on a regular network, right? So I just get dumped into this website. Okay. But let's say
that I was using Tor. Well, instead of going straight to try maple.ai, which means that my
internet service provider knows that I'm going there because I'm using my internet and they see
that I want to go to that website and my privacy is not very secure. Well, Tor will take that and
we'll wrap it in multiple layers of encryption. This is where the onion metaphor comes from.
And then it passes your packet around to lots of different computers around the world.
and the way that that works is that each computer which is a relay or a node it knows the previous
and the next hop that it needs to make on this path on this circuit it doesn't know the entire
path it's only given the one previous and the next one and so it receives this packet from someone
from a node and it removes one layer of encryption and then passes it on to the next one
so the data is decrypted one layer at a time per relay and then the final relay is called the exit
node and that's where it sends the data to the final destination on the internet so i think this
is important to kind of repeat the client at the beginning adds all these layers up front and then
each relay removes one layer of encryption so that only the exit node sees the payload and it sees it
in plain text so in my example of going to try maple.ai the exit node would see that i wanted to
now the exit node probably has no idea who I am because I'm obfuscated away through all these
different hops but it does see the address I'm going to now let's say that this was something
where I had a bunch of sensitive personal information in there the exit node would see
that and could potentially know about me so if you really want true full end-to-end encryption
you will want to use HTTPS SSH or other end-to-end encrypted things so in this example using Maple
Maple is already end-to-end encrypted, so I could use Maple safely on the network,
and the exit node would not know what I'm talking about because it is end-to-end encrypted and keep it confidential.
There are three node types on the Tor network.
In fact, I want to, let's see, give me, in Maple here, we're going to pull up Maple,
and I want to have it give me like a text network diagram of the Tor network.
Give me a brief text network diagram of the Tor network.
Okay, let's see if this can do this.
I'll be interested to see.
Kind of experimenting a little bit here.
If you don't know, my name is Marks, so I didn't say that at the beginning,
but it's me and a co-founder.
We make Maple AI, which is your end-to-end encrypted private AI solution.
So I use this every day, all day.
All right, so here's the R network diagram. It starts with your device using a Tor client,
typically a Tor browser, and it goes to an entry node, which is called a guard node,
and that guard node encrypts all of your traffic. Well, the client encrypts traffic, right, but then
passes it to the guard node, and then the guard node takes it, it passes it along to a middle
node, and there are n number of middle nodes, right? So it's going to pass around all these
different middle nodes and each one will remove one layer of encryption and then
the exit node which in fancy terminology is called egress node that is just where
it leaves the network then it goes out and talks to the actual internet and it
gives you your thing and then it passes it back okay I want to know this is
going off my screen here.
Give me the security
diagram
in reverse
when the website
is coming back to the client.
So we saw how it gets to the website
and gets to the internet. Well, how does it feed it back to you?
Because that's also important, right?
So now we're going to go in reverse.
It is passing the unencrypted response from the website back to the exit node.
And then the exit node encrypts it, passes it to middle nodes,
and then they encrypt it back and give it to your Tor client,
which decrypts it and shows it to you.
One quick thing to say is that this is AI, and AI sometimes gets things wrong,
so verify this yourself.
But this is a really basic network diagram of how the Tor Onion network works.
Great.
Okay.
Let's see what else I have here.
So that's kind of the rundown of how Tor works.
I want to just give a brief history of the project and show you roughly what it's like.
And then now we can go into and actually look at the project and download it and play around with it.
So how many people we got?
We got 14 people.
Welcome again.
The chats are open.
So if you want to hop in the chat on X, on YouTube, on zap.stream, which is our Noster
streaming service, feel free.
Okay.
Oh, man.
I just got booted.
Okay.
There we go.
Okay.
So we're back up and running.
Excuse me.
So let's go over.
This is obviously the project website, which I just showed you.
Now, it's important to me to show off the open source, the code that's available.
So here, Tor runs its own GitLab instance.
It does not depend on GitHub.
There are repositories on GitHub that are unofficial,
and they try to mirror what's going on on the Tor GitLab site.
But just know that if you want to go to the source, the true source,
it's on gitlab.torproject.org.
But very grateful for people who run mirrors and who have their own their own forks so that we can make sure that this
important code never goes away
Okay, so here it is
Almost 40,000 commits a bunch of branches. It is under the creative comments
attribution share alike 4.0 international license
So before doing any work on this code
Make sure that you understand what that license is about and how it impacts you and the work that you want to do.
Okay, they have all sorts of stuff here on the website.
They've got a whole community page where you can join the tour community and they got a lot of content here on
how to use it.
So if you want to support you can donate directly to it, right? They take all sorts of payments.
Okay, great. I don't want to spend too much time on that
But I really want to dive in there's one last cool thing that I'll bring up before we download and run it and that
Is this project called L tour?
L tour was given a grant from the open SATs
project which is helping to fund development of this
Bitcoin lightning network
incentivize network for for running relay nodes
There's one problem with the Tor network that it has and it is it depends on people running nodes
To support the network and support all of this traffic if you've used Tor
You know that sometimes it can be kind of slow and that is one by design
but also because we need more people running nodes and
There's just not as much bandwidth out there
So if so this person is trying to solve this problem also read this real quick
It says, L-Tor is a high bandwidth Tor network fork incentivized by the Bitcoin Lightning Network by enabling users to host relays and earn SATs.
SATs are small versions of Bitcoin.
So earn Bitcoin for sharing bandwidth.
L-Tor addresses existing limitations of the Tor network while supporting anonymous communication.
The project enhances censorship resistance and facilitates private interactions for services like e-cash mints, Nostra relays, and Bitcoin node communication.
LTOR plans to expand the network's scale and capabilities by onboarding more relays globally and leveraging financial incentives to drive adoption.
This effort will support greater bandwidth, reliability, and anonymity for users and aims to provide a sustainable model for future development.
The project will continue refining its code base and exploring integrations that bring the vision of private decentralized communications closer to reality.
The license is 3ClawsBSD.
So if you want to learn more about this, you can go to opensats.org.
And it's on their blog under the ninth wave of Bitcoin grants.
So they do different waves of grants.
And this was under the ninth wave.
And it's called LTOR, E-L space T-O-R.
And they also have their code up on Bitbucket.
So you can go to bitbucket.org slash LTOR dev and see the code there for what they're doing.
Okay, so let's go ahead and download the Tor browser.
So I am on macOS with this server, so I'm just going to download it here.
Okay.
Downloading. Yes, it is.
You can see our Bitwarden download from a previous episode.
If you want to go back and learn about password managers and Freedom Tech for that,
you can go back and watch the previous episode of password managers.
Okay.
So we just drag Tor browser over here.
I might already have one.
Look at that.
I do.
We're just going to replace it because I don't know what version it is,
and I don't want to deal with updating right now.
Okay.
So now let's go to Tor browser and open it up.
And it's going to ask, are you sure you want to open this?
It's from the scary internet.
Okay.
So Tor is opened.
Now the first thing it does is it just sits there, right,
and is not connected to the Tor network.
You can see that up on the top right.
This is important to pay attention to, right?
I'm not currently safe, if you will.
I'm not connected.
I don't know why it's taking so long.
Come on, Tor.
Tor, Tor, Tor, Tor.
Let's quit it and come back.
Oh, application's not responding.
Lovely.
Okay.
I'm not going to report you.
Let's try it again.
Okay.
I'm getting a spinning wheel of death. I don't know why it's not working. I've
honestly never had this happen before where Tor just won't do anything. That's
really funny. Well I'll have a backup option here. I'm gonna open up Tor on my
main computer that I'm streaming from and we'll see if I can get it working
Let me launch it on my main computer.
Okay, it's working here, so I'm going to shift windows right now and we'll switch over there.
Always good to have backup options.
Replace screen sharing with Tor.
We're going to lose our Maple AI.
That's alright though.
Okay, so now you're seeing my Tor browser.
Alright, so the first thing it does is ask if we want to connect to the Tor network.
Now you can configure this connection.
There are a lot of things you can add in here.
So you can add in your own bridges.
And bridges are a special kind of node that are unlisted on the Tor network.
And they allow you to get around firewalls.
So if you live in a country that has a great firewall that blocks access to things,
you can come in here and you can have a friend or find online somewhere
somebody gives you a bridge that you can add.
And so you can get to it.
still. So this is great. We need more people running bridges. So a lot of other settings
in here you can do, but let's just go back and connect the Tor. You can have it always connect
by default when you launch, but when you first install, it's not turned on. So let's go ahead
and connect. So what it's doing now is this little bar here is progressing across, and it is
connecting me to an entry relay, an entry node. Okay, here we are. We are now on the Tor network.
What is this onionized thing, right? Well, onionized means that I am going to run over
websites that are actually hosted on the Tor network. So that's a whole other layer to this
onion. A whole other layer here is that you can have websites that are hosted directly on Tor.
So the exit relay is not going out to the plain text internet.
It is just staying within the Tor network.
There is a project that we will cover on a future episode called Start 9.
Let me just search here for Start 9.
So what's happening right now is I'm searching the internet.
Through the Tor network, you notice it's a little bit slower.
But Start 9 is a server software operating system,
but they also make physical servers that you can buy with their software on it.
But it is a system that allows you to run Freedom Tech apps,
Freedom Tech tools, and host your data yourself in your house
or really in any location that you want to.
But one of the main ways that Start9 has you connect to your own private server,
right, opt out by running a private server, is that they go over the Tor network.
And so they expose each of the apps on here.
So let's say that you're running Next Cloud, which is your own self-sovereign cloud to host your own documents and things.
It will expose Next Cloud over your own personal Tor address, and then you'll connect to it that way.
They're actually working on other ways to not depend solely on the Tor network, but this is one way they'd be doing it.
So hey, Onion available.
So I click on that.
Instead of using start9.com, it's now taking me to this Onion address for start9.
So here we are.
We're loading the Start9 website directly on the Tor network, which is pretty cool, right?
Let's see if Try Maple.
I actually haven't tried this in a while.
I did when we first launched, but let's try it.
Let's see if Maple works on the Tor network.
It should.
I mean, Tor should be able to load any website.
That's the whole point.
Here we go.
TryMaple.ai.
and here we are in light mode because this server that I'm running apparently is in light mode.
All right. So yeah, you can have end-to-end encrypted AI, right, on the Tor network
through your Tor browser. Pretty sweet. Okay. I would love to get this where
onion address is available and we can do that on the onion routed network. That would be pretty
Cool.
OK, so let's look at some of the other things we have here.
We have the security thing.
So all browser and website features
are enabled, security levels.
We have security levels here.
What does that mean?
Let's go to Settings and check that out.
You can disable certain web features
that can be used to attack your security and anonymity.
So you have different levels here.
We have standard, where all browser and website features
are enabled.
We have safer, disables website features
that are often dangerous, causing some sites to lose
functionality.
And then we have safest.
Only allows website features required for static sites
and basic services.
These changes affect images, media, and scripts.
So these are different levels that you can set.
And you can set it for all the websites you visit.
And then I think you can also do it per website,
but you'd have to verify that.
But this means that certain things like JavaScript,
different cookies, other technology that
are deployed on the website that might be used to track you,
or could, in theory, be used to track you,
If you need higher levels of privacy, you can set these to be stronger,
but they are going to break some of the functionality on the websites that you visit.
If I click learn more, there's a whole page about this that walks into the security levels and what happens here.
So it says on standard, everything's available.
On safer, it disables things.
Let's see.
JavaScript is disabled on all non-HTTPS websites.
Some of the fonts and math symbols are disabled.
Audio and video are HTML5 media.
Must be clicked to play.
So if you go to a website that has a video that's like playing in the background,
some of these websites do that just like as a visual treatment for the website.
Those videos will not play automatically, and you'll have to click to play them.
And depending on the website, there might not be a way to expose that button to click to play it.
So yeah, some website functionality will stop working.
and then the safest one says JavaScript is disabled by default on all websites.
Some fonts, icons, math symbols, and images are disabled.
Audio and video, HTML5, are click-to-play.
So that's your understanding of the different security levels that you can have.
Now, what is this new identity thing next to the security icon?
This means that I can reconnect, basically, to the Tor network through a different node.
and for a new browser, for a new tab.
So each tab I can have a different identity on
so that I'm not even being tracked tab to tab, right?
Because let's say that I have all these tabs open
and I'm going through the same path every time.
In theory, you could potentially start to craft who I am over time.
All right, so now I want to reset my identity.
I guess it's not. I thought it was per tab.
Interesting.
I think there is a way to do it per tab.
But, okay, so let's say that I was worried.
I just got booted off the screen share because it relaunched.
So let me go back now to my screen share.
Here we are.
So here we are back in Tor, and I have a new identity.
So now I have reconnected to the Tor network through a different path completely.
Tor is based off of Firefox, just so you know.
So you go to that Tor browser, and it is based off the Firefox project.
They follow very closely with the Firefox release schedule, to my understanding.
And so it's got the same update mechanism, but it goes through Tor rather than Firefox.
So it'll check for updates, and then you install those updates when you want to.
Okay, those are the basics of Tor.
We have gone over on time.
Well, we're actually right at 30 minutes, so that's perfect.
Great.
We got up to 18 people watching.
Welcome, everybody.
Thanks for tuning in.
We do have a few people here.
What's up?
When 0.4.0.
This person, Pseudo Carlos, is on a work phone call.
I'm trying to pay attention to the work phone call, but also this.
I feel your pain.
Trust me.
But that's right.
This is going to be archived on YouTube X as well as audio version on podcasts.
You can search for Freedom Tech Weekend on your favorite podcast space.
So Pseudo Carlos, you'll be able to check it out.
When you say when 0.4.0, I assume that you are referring to Start 9.
I would love to get the newest version of Start 9, 0.4.
Let's look here.
Yeah, because right now they're on 0.3.5.
0.4 is when they start to offer more of the clear net stuff.
ClearNet is basically the internet, so not having to depend on Tor.
And it's going to open up Start9 to much more normal, friendly use cases for people
who don't want to have their device fully connected to the Tor network all the time
and only be accessible through the Tor network.
So I don't know when.
They've been talking about 0.4 for a long time.
I know that is very complicated because they are trying to build their software to be extremely robust and hardy
so that I can get through any home router and set up port forwarding and all that stuff
perfectly for you. So yeah,
I
don't know when, but I'm looking forward to it because I run Start9
at home. I love it. I use it every day and I would love to use it more and onboard more friends and
family to my Start9 server. But unfortunately right now, if you have Start9 and you have apps
on your iPhone that depend on Start9 server functionality, you have to get your phone
onto the Tor network through a VPN, and that means that you're constantly switching back
and forth, and it doesn't always stay connected. It's a bit of a difficult situation right
now. The UX could be better, but I love the Start9 team. I've chatted with them on many
occasions. I've met them in person on many occasions, and I love the work that they're
doing. We've had some discussions about what we're doing with Maple AI and specifically with
OpenSecret.Cloud. Let me pull these up real quick. So Maple depends on secure enclaves. It's built
on top of OpenSecret, which is using secure enclaves to make a private key for you. And so
it is able to encrypt your traffic end to end. Start9 is taking a different approach. They are
trying to buck the trend of cloud computing completely and bring all of your stuff home.
And so you run your own server at home, which is typically a difficult thing, but they're trying
to make it easy for people. So I just want the public to know here that I really like my Start9
software, but I also really love Maple and I love OpenSecret and what we can do here with
secure enclaves. And I think that there's a place for both of them. Who knows long-term,
long-term would be really cool if we all had actual secure enclaves at home that we were
running ourselves. And so now we are marrying this self-sovereign computing with cryptographically
verifiable code that is running so that I know that the code on my home server is the code that
I expect it to be. So when I'm away from home and I'm connecting, I know the entire supply chain
and I know what I'm talking to. So I think that there's a future where both of these projects
potentially come together. We're talking way down the road when secure enclaves for home servers are
a thing, which would be really, really neat. Okay, great. Well, we are over on time. Thanks for
tuning in to Freedom Tech Weekend and watching this episode about the TOR network, the Onion
Routing Network. I would just encourage everybody to play around with this weekend. That's what we
do here on Freedom Tech Weekend. We give you one tool you can explore this weekend when you have
free time. So play around with Tor. Give it a shot. Would also love for you, if you want to
support the show, we don't have advertisers. I don't take, you know, I don't take sponsorship
money. I work on Maple every day, day in and day out. It's available on the web at trymaple.ai.
It's also available on the app store, on the iOS app store.
You can search for Maple AI or Confidential AI or Private AI.
You'll find it in different spots on the search when you do that.
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A lot of value in it, which our users do.
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All right.
Well, thank you so much.
Thanks for tuning in, and we will catch you next weekend.
Later.