I took great delight in picking his brain recently and our conversation went as follows:
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>>> what made you want to gather these onions?
Basically, curiosity. I had known for a while about the existence of hidden services on Tor, and given them little thought. Back when I started the spider, a lot of HSs had disappeared along with the (original) Silk Road which was shut down just before I started.
So there was a situation where nobody seemed to know what was up and down, and there was a lot of stuff down. This wasn't helped, by the way that Tor HS doesn't give a meaningful error message - you don't know if a site is just temporarily broken, or permanently gone.
I just wanted a list of what was up, which was informative, but mostly accurate and complete. I have little idea of how complete my list now is, but I think it's at least as good as anyone else's list.
>>> what do you expect for the future of tor? is it a sustainable, reliable system?
Difficult to know. I was gonna check my crystal but it's in the repair shop (damn thing always clouds over).
I worry about governments wanting to be able to censor / block Tor and other VPNs etc. Countries like the USA, Germany, Canada, UK which are known for free speech are beginning to show signs of wanting rid of the likes of Tor - not that it's at all practical for them to do so. Iran, China etc, already try to block Tor and potentially have criminalised its use, at least for their own citizens. Russian and other countries, seem to be taking a hard line but haven't totally banned Tor yet.
I also worry slightly about the implications of legislation in otherwise free countries for security researchers or other interested parties - the idea that the simple ownership of information (not sharing, spreading or promoting) is illegal, is somewhat scary.
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