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Am I being overly paranoid?
Yes, simply connecting to the Tor network is not a sketchy thing and browsing the clearnet using Tor is a smart way to preserve your privacy if you aren't in a hurry for your pages to load.
I used to browse the clearnet with Tor regularly but eventually I decided it was overkill and stopped (Tor really is slow a lot of the time so it isn't always a walk in the park).
Please let us know who has the most entry and exit nodes... Anyone who uses Tor is being closely monitored. 🤣🤣🤣
Tor used to be good... back when most of the entry and exit nodes weren't run by the government. Now it's a honeypot.
IIRC the government has actually always had a large number of nodes because the government helped to create the Tor network. I don't think they operate "most" of the entry and exit nodes though. With appropriate precautions it is still a hugely effective tool to preserve privacy.
For example, the person who ran the "Silk Road" (formerly the most famous website marketplace on the darknet) was only caught because of revealing personal information theough forum posts and on the clearnet, not because the government can see the traffic of anyone using Tor (which they cannot if you are using https). There are way too many curious high schoolers out there for it to make sense for them to monitor like that anyway. The more people who use it, the more effective of a tool for privacy it becomes.
Btw Cyberbunker, Kryptophones, and other marketplaces... More and more of them are being taken down. Why do you only mention Silk Road? Whats with Operation Alice etc ( btw meta data is enough... so https etc doesnt matter )
Um, it's not just one government. It goes beyond national borders. People have already forgotten all about Snowden and stuff—how ridiculous.
I don't use tor much. My main use case at the moment is using the tor browser for all the sites that block me because I use a vpn. Works most of the time. I have a small list of onion sites that are only accessible through tor but it's more of "break glass in case of privacy emergency" type of thing.
I have a small list of onion sites that are only accessible through tor but it’s more of “break glass in case of privacy emergency” type of thing.
Services you run or ones you use in certain circumstances?
The latter
Honestly surprising that websites would block VPNs, but not Tor? Tor seems like it should be considered even less trustworthy from their perspective?
My guess is that it's a lot easier to get a list of IPs to block from VPN providers than tor exit nodes
I doubt that because for example the Wikimedia wikis have been very successfully blocking Tor exit nodes from editing their wikis for a very long time; if they can do that, anyone can.
I run a Tor proxy on my raspberry pi and all my browsers across all my household devices have foxyproxy installed. This way we access defined websites through Tor as standard eg when we query search engines and wikipedia. I try not to overburden Tor though. Never had a problem.