I do not want to start a flame war or anything here. This is my personal opinion and is subject to change at any time. The idea is to present a point of view (happens to be my current one) as a pretext for discussion about the pros and cons of Jondo vs. Tor. Also, let me clearly state that both services are free services with the exception that JonDo allows access to faster mixes with a pay option. The "slow" Jondo mixes are very usable (I used them myself for many months) and everything I write here applies equally well to them as to the "premium" JonDo mix cascades.

I personally chose JonDo over Tor because with JonDo the user may obtain the identity, location, log policies and privacy laws of the servers (relays in Tor-speak) and countries in a particular cascade (don't fret if you don't understand all this yet -- I will expand on cascades below). With Tor, as far as I understand, one can connect to many servers but there is no way to know who controls the servers you connect to, who they are associated with, and the type of logging/data storage they perform. This lack of knowledge made me suspect initially of Tor. Of course, since anyone can be a Tor relay there are many more in existence than for JonDo, so anonymity may be greater; but since they are unknown they could be run by the FBI as far as I know (honeypot anyone?). I may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean no one's after me . Turns out I'm paranoid and correct -- one of the links I posted above (Schneier on Security: Anonymity and the Tor Network) discusses how a user setup a Tor relay and obtained hundreds of user email accounts and passwords. This is the key weakness with Tor in my opinion -- the last server in the mix has a lot of power and can "sniff" or read any data you are sending to a website that is not encrypted on the server end. Now, one might say the same for JonDo, but with JonDo, I KNOW who is running the final server in the mix. They are various universities, privacy organizations and companies with some extra bandwidth that want to help increase anonymity and perhaps earn a little money for the bandwidth costs; and they all sign a contract with JonDos that enforces a set of security practices -- like not storing traffic logs (of course they must comply with any national data retention laws -- but read my next post for why this is not such an issue and also some good practices to use when running JonDo to make sure your comms are as anonymous as possible).

The other reason I chose JonDo is performance -- with a payment plan (for example 40 Euros for 6.5gb bandwidth) you can achieve quite good performance using JonDo, though it is entirely free by default, if a bit slow. That being said this thread is not intended as a JonDo-only thread -- I think each choice has its pros and cons and so its a decision made best by the individual it effects -- you.

Here is a link to an interesting discussion of Jap vs. Tor on the JAP/JonDo forum: https://www.jondos.de/en/uieforum?c=...&ThreadID=2725
larryshomework Reviewed by larryshomework on . Anonymity on the net -- JAP/Jondo, Tor and usage tracking Hey there everybody, I'm a noob here, and a friend of cannabis forum member Apollonia. She encouraged me to post some information I put together that may be useful to people who are interested in increasing their anonymity online. For my part my goal is to explain some dark corners and to create a discussion space on the subjects of JonDo, Tor and internet tracking. I break the initial discussion into five posts as follows: *Introduction *Online Anonymity - what it is & how to Rating: 5