r/TOR • u/Realistic_Dig8176 • Jun 13 '25
On behalf of all the participating large-scale Tor operators, we want to extend a massive thank you to everyone who joined us for this Ask Me Anything. Quite a few questions were answered and there were some insightful discussion.
We hope that we've been able to shed some light on the challenges, rewards, and vital importance of operating Tor infrastructure. Every relay, big or small, contributes to a more private and secure internet for users worldwide.
Remember, the Tor network is a community effort. If you're inspired to learn more or even consider running a relay yourself, don't hesitate to join the Tor Relay Operators channel on Matrix, the #tor-relays channel on IRC, the mailing list or forums. There are fantastic resources available to help you out and many operators are very willing to lend you a hand in your journey as a Tor operator. Every new operator strengthens the network's resilience and capacity.
Thank you again for your good curiosity and question. Keep advocating for privacy and freedoms, and we look forward to seeing you in the next one!
Ever wondered what it takes to keep the Tor network running? Curious about the operational complexities, technical hurdles and legal challenges of running Tor relays (at scale)? Want to know more about the motivations of the individuals safeguarding online anonymity and freedom for millions worldwide?
Today we're hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with four experienced large-scale Tor operators! This is your chance to directly engage with the people running this crucial network. Ask them anything about:
This AMA offers a unique opportunity to gain firsthand insights into anything you have been curious about. And maybe we can also bust a few myths and perhaps inspire others in joining us.
Today, Tor operators will answer all your burning questions between 08:00-23:00 UTC.
This translates to the following local times:
| Timezone | abbreviation | Local times |
|---|---|---|
| Eastern Daylight Time | EDT | 04:00-19:00 |
| Pacific Daylight Time | PDT | 01:00-16:00 |
| Central European Summer Time | CEST | 10:00-01:00 |
| Eastern European Summer Time | EEST | 11:00-02:00 |
| Australian Eastern Standard Time | AEST | 18:00-09:00 |
| Japan Standard Time | JST | 17:00-08:00 |
| Australian Western Standard Time | AWST | 16:00-07:00 |
| New Zealand Standard Time | NZST | 20:00-11:00 |
Four excellent large scale Tor operators are willing to answer all your burning questions. Together they are good for almost 40% of the total Tor exit capacity. Let's introduce them!
R0cket (tor.r0cket.net) is part of a Swedish hosting provider that is driven by a core belief in a free and open internet. They run Tor relays to help users around the world access information privately and circumvent censorship.
Nothing to hide (nothingtohide.nl) is a non-profit privacy infrastructure provider based in the Netherlands. They run Tor relays and other privacy-enhancing services. Nothing to hide is part of the Church of Cyberology, a religion grounded in the principles of (digital) freedom and privacy.
Artikel10 (artikel10.org) is a Tor operator based in Hamburg/Germany. Artikel10 is a non-profit member-based association that is dedicated to upholding the fundamental rights to secure and confidential communication.
CCC Stuttgard (cccs.de) is a member-based branch association of the well known Chaos Computer Club from Germany. CCCS is all about technology and the internet and in light of that they passionately advocate for digital civil rights through practical actions, such as running Tor relays.
Account authenticity can be verified by opening https://domain.tld/.well-known/ama.txt files hosted on the primary domain of these organizations. These text files will contain: "AMA reddit=username mastodon=username".
Because Reddit is not available to all users of the Tor network, we also provide a parallel AMA account on Mastodon. We will cross-post the questions asked there to the Reddit AMA post. Link to Mastodon: mastodon.social/@tor_ama@mastodon.social.
r/TOR • u/GuavaTurbulent8498 • 12h ago
just got tor today, anything i should know before i start using it? i mostly just got it because im sick of being tracked everywhere but i dont plan on making it my main browser, ive made a fake email for it just in case but i really dont want a virus or anything
r/TOR • u/Active-Drop1218 • 22h ago
After being away from the community for some time and taking down my relays for personal life reasons, I think I’m ready to start contributing again, and since I ran everything on Linux systems, I’d like to switch to BSD in order to contribute to system diversity.
For that matter, I came across the Tor BSD Diversity Project, but although the website is still available, it hasn’t been actualised for a long time, and I wonder if it was just because it didn’t get enough love by relay operators or the people behind it just gave up.
r/TOR • u/AppointmentNormal996 • 23h ago
Hi all Tor & Linux experts,
I am trying to join the anonymous world and like to know why I can't see anything as clear as orbot. But then for laptops & PC's.
I already have the Tor network.
And don't want any third parties generated programs where they still have access on.
Something like orbot. Is this possible?
I am still studying.
Thank you.
r/TOR • u/No_Aerie7667 • 20h ago
I exported my passwords to a CSV document from Waterfox, and the Tor browser refuses them all because it's missing a field of some sort.
Row 1 Error: Missing field
Row 2 Error: Missing field
Row 3 Error: Missing field
Row 4 Error: Missing field
Row 5 Error: Missing field
Row 6 Error: Missing field
Row 7 Error: Missing field
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Row 10 Error: Missing field
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Row 20 Error: Missing field
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Row 24 Error: Missing field
Row 25 Error: Missing field
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Row 28 Error: Missing field
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Row 30 Error: Missing field
Row 31 Error: Missing field
Row 32 Error: Missing field
Row 33 Error: Missing field
Row 34 Error: Missing field
Row 35 Error: Missing field
Row 36 Error: Missing field
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Row 38 Error: Missing field
Row 39 Error: Missing field
Row 40 Error: Missing field
Row 41 Error: Missing field
Row 42 Error: Missing field
Row 43 Error: Missing field
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Row 45 Error: Missing field
Row 46 Error: Missing field
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Row 49 Error: Missing field
Row 50 Error: Missing field
Row 51 Error: Missing field
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Row 53 Error: Missing field
Row 54 Error: Missing field
Row 55 Error: Missing field
Row 56 Error: Missing field
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Row 60 Error: Missing field
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Row 150 Error: Missing field
Row 151 Error: Missing field
Row 152 Error: Missing field
Row 153 Error: Missing field
Row 154 Error: Missing field
Row 155 Error: Missing field
Row 156 Duplicate: Exact match of existing entry
Row 157 Error: Missing field
Row 158 Error: Missing field
Row 159 Error: Missing field
Row 160 Error: Missing field
Row 161 Error: Missing field
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r/TOR • u/BTC-brother2018 • 1d ago
Tor website fingerprinting looks more practical than many older lab studies suggested
A March 8, 2026 paper, “Reality Check for Tor Website Fingerprinting in the Open World,” tested website fingerprinting against a much more realistic background of actual Tor traffic. The researchers built a dataset of 800,000+ traces and reported their best attack reaching about 95.6% precision and 92.2% recall at a 9% monitored-site base rate. Importantly, the attack remained effective despite network jitter, smaller training sets, and changing network conditions.
What changed: website-fingerprinting research has historically been criticized for artificial closed-world experiments, basically, “pick which of these 100 sites the person visited.” This work moves closer to the difficult real-world problem: determining whether a user visited one of a few monitored destinations amid huge amounts of unrelated Tor traffic.
The researchers also found that classifiers relying less heavily on precise timing were surprisingly robust. That reinforces an important concept: encryption hides packet contents, but not necessarily packet direction, burst structure, volume, and sequence. Tor therefore protects what the packets contain much better than it eliminates every observable traffic pattern. Read about it here: 👇
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07412
The practical lesson I'd draw is:
Tor hides destinations cryptographically, but encrypted traffic isn't information-free.
Tor remains extremely valuable for anonymity, but users with a threat model involving a sophisticated adversary specifically targeting their Tor activity should treat traffic analysis/website fingerprinting as a legitimate threat, not merely an academic laboratory attack. imo
For the typical person using Tor to prevent websites from learning their IP address, bypass censorship, or reduce ordinary tracking, this paper isn't a reason to stop using Tor.
r/TOR • u/Pryty_26 • 1d ago
Hi currently I am developing a Rust-Based Pluggable Transport library, I guess if you have subscripted tor-dev you could received my proposal mail too.
So I was wondering, whether you would be interested to involve in this framework development? 🙂
Here is my repository:
gitlab.torproject.org/pryty26/rust-pt
codeberg.org/pryty26/rust-pt
r/TOR • u/BigRocket44 • 1d ago
I don't care about the anonymity as much as care about the speed. While I use Tor, some circuits are just twice or thrice as much faster as others, while some circuits are practically unusable. I have to restart the Tor browser and hope to land on a good circuit. I know that randomization is done for anonymity, but I am not worried about that as much, and I just want good speed. Is there a way I can configure it to use faster nodes at the cost of anonymity? Can I hand pick nodes?
r/TOR • u/BeforeIAssume • 4d ago
r/TOR • u/Candid_Mind2823 • 5d ago
Does tor work very well on mint 22.3 cinnamon?
r/TOR • u/Realistic_Debate1704 • 5d ago
I tried to host an onion site from my laptop and installed tor on my Linux, and after that experiment, I deleted the website files from my laptop, and today after 4 months I came to know that tor was still running on my laptop because I enabled it using "systemctl enable". So there are few questions. Running Tor for such long time could create problems like government might be recording my traffic. And might disguising me in any illicit activities?? Or tell me if there is no connection to tor relays from my laptop as I deleted my website files. Please explain me all this because I don't want any trouble and I'm a student of CS and don't know about the terms so ignore any mistakes in above para.
r/TOR • u/Automatic-Yard-4582 • 5d ago
Hi, I tried to re-install tor, I can visit same sites with brave but when i launch tor browser and try to enter any site with video inside, tab crashes and asks me for refresh page.
I also tried to delete all tor files, install to another path, Still same issue.
I uninstalled my graphic driver & installed it back didnt work well.
Whats wrong with my computer i cant understand, Should i do format, reinstall win11?
r/TOR • u/SuspiciousAnt9310 • 6d ago
Hi everyone,
I’ve been experimenting with a simple managed Onion hosting service for people who want to publish a .onion website but don’t want to deal with Tor configuration, server setup, backups, and maintenance.
The idea is to offer:
.onion addressThe service would be aimed at legitimate projects such as independent creators, researchers, privacy-focused communities, journalists, archives, and small organizations.
I already have a working prototype running through Tor, and before turning it into a real service I’d like to hear from people who already operate Onion Services.
What would you consider essential in a managed Onion hosting service?
What are the biggest problems or risks you would expect the provider to handle?
I’m especially interested in feedback about reliability, backups, isolation between customers, privacy, and pricing.
r/TOR • u/avinorel • 7d ago
Hi i wanted to open tor for the first time and check around, but this pop-up is showing what schoudl i do?
r/TOR • u/coolbug0 • 7d ago
I want to switch from firefox to tor for more privacy, but ive seen many many people saying that you shouldnt log into your accounts like gmail or youtube i guess. Is that true??
r/TOR • u/Antique-Wasabi-2427 • 9d ago
I haven't seen anyone use TOR for anything that isn't browser related? the only thing's i seen is.
I'm wondering if anyone uses TOR that isn't browsing.
r/TOR • u/MindlessHeart322 • 9d ago
r/TOR • u/Medical-Side-3306 • 9d ago
every time I try to open to browser it just shows this, and I already tried everything like I tried to delete every single file that I have of TOR browser and download it again and nothing works, so I don’t know what to do.
r/TOR • u/CraryTraey • 9d ago
When im trying to use startpage as a search engine in tor browser, im going through verification and then getting *THIS!:*
"Something went wrong during verification.
Try refreshing the page or using a different browser.
If this issue continues and you believe it is an error, contact support."
Im not using any extensions
I use a bridge: snowflake
I use android.
I got the latest version of my Tor browser.
I also tried using .onion and simple startpage search engine, and using a new circuit. Please guys, help me.
r/TOR • u/FantasticEconomy5406 • 9d ago
New here, so please excuse my ignorance.
I used Brave TOR private window, did a Google Maps check, and the middle of Iran came up. Does that mean my traffic is routed through there? Would that flag any government agency? In case there is any curiosity, it was to avoid plane ticket price changing.
r/TOR • u/BTC-brother2018 • 10d ago
The Tor Project released Tor Browser 16.010 on August 27. The alpha includes Firefox security updates, a redesigned settings interface, and a newly updated built-in Tor Browser manual accessible through about:manual. Tor explicitly warns that this is a testing release, not the version ordinary or high-risk users should switch to.
This gives a preview of changes that may eventually reach stable Tor Browser, especially the new settings layout covering connectivity, letterboxing, and security levels. For beginners, the important message is: stay on stable Tor Browser unless you specifically want to test alpha builds.
https://blog.torproject.org/new-alpha-release-tor-browser-160a10/
r/TOR • u/Jumpy_Win_5119 • 11d ago
I have both linux and windows , and the windows on my computer has personal info on it so my question is there any way like literally any way that when iam browsing the deep web and actually interact with it ( and i'm using linux ) someone can steal the info on the windows version ? I knew that its not possible but just extra checking .
