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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I used Tor as a small part of one of the capabilities of a supply chain integrity startup

… I used Tor as a small part of one of the capabilities of a supply chain integrity startup. I built a fancy scraper/crawler to discreetly monitor a major international marketplace (mainstream, not darknet), including selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site, to try to ensure that we were seeing the same site content that people from those regions were seeing. Tor somehow worked perfectly for those needs. So my only big concern was making sure everyone in the startup knew not to go bragging about this unusually good data we had. Since we were one C&D letter away from not being able to get the data at all. (Unfortunately, this had to be a little adversarial with the marketplace, not done as a data-sharing partnership, since the marketplace benefited from a cut of all the counterfeit and graymarket sales that we were trying to fight. But I made sure the scraper was gentle yet effective, both to not be a jerk, and also to not attract attention.) (I can talk about it now, since the startup ran out of runway during Covid investor skittishness.)

Original discussionTor: How a military project became a lifeline for privacy191 source comments · at import
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RG

> selecting appropriate Tor exit nodes for each regional site So, a proxy? Onion routing doesn't really play a role for this use case.

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RO

HEH I'm letting my imagination fill in the color on the specifics here and I'm working up a little grin. A hat tip to you

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CA

This is not a good way to do this. Tor exit nodes are public and may be marked for special behavior by the marketplace you are surveying. There is no reason to believe you are getting good information this way. The right way to do this would be through a VPN/tor + Residential proxy to hide your intentions from everyone involved.

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EL

Next time you find yourself in this situation, a $5 VPN subscription (Mullvad, etc.) gets you the same result without the IP being an obvious Tor exit node. Faster, too, in latency, bandwidth, and the time it takes to change locations. You only care about the VPN part for this, not the onion part.

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GL

Is it that difficult for a business to colo in various locations? Not rhetorical, I've never thought about it.

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