[OSM-talk] Anonymous edits on OpenStreetMap through Tor

Toby Murray toby.murray at gmail.com
Thu Oct 7 16:04:06 BST 2010


Typically the way I've seen it set up, the browser is configured to
send requests through a proxy that is running on the local machine
which then routes traffic out over tor. So most (all?) flash and even
some javascript won't be affected and will send traffic out from your
real IP without tor. There may be a way to change routing tables for
the host or maybe run a tor-only VM in virtualbox... not sure about
that.

But hiding your real IP from the server is only one part of tor. The
other is encrypting and obscuring the destination of all traffic so
that your ISP/government/etc can't listen in. This is what makes it
useful for people in places like Iran and China. They don't care about
hiding their IP from twitter. They care about getting around the
censorship and surveillance put in place by the government.

I guess I'm not sure what benefit tor has to potential mappers. At the
end of the day you still have to log in to OSM with an OSM user name
which is associated with an email address. I guess you could go to the
trouble of setting up an email address and an OSM user that you ONLY
access from tor... Are there any countries where mappers are a
persecuted class?

Toby


On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 4:54 AM, Kevin Peat <kevin at kevinpeat.com> wrote:
> Not sure about the security benefits of using Tor with OSM but I have messed
> with it in the past and the performance can be pretty poor and probably not
> great for an interactive Potlatch session. I've also read somewhere that
> flash apps can easily give away your local IP even when using Tor.
>
> Kevin
>
>
> On 6 October 2010 22:46, Niklas Cholmkvist <towardsoss at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> is anyone contributing to OpenStreetMap by using Tor? (the onion router)
>> Is there any opinion from anyone about this? Tor is used to strengthen
>> ones privacy by the technology trying to prevent revealing the ip
>> address of the user.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Niklas
>> --
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>
>
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