The Brave browser has around 60 million MAUs and has Tor bundled with it, so Tor traffic is unlikely to stand out as much as before.
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Similarly, as do the Trezor wallets.
Quite a few people involved in crypto send a bit of TOR noise across the wires using that client to do transactions
This is a good point, though. We need more and more things to use it (legitimately) so that the traffic alone isn't as suspect.
It'll always be a little suspect, I suppose, being only visible to exit nodes or whatever
I believe the Tor feature of Brave is an optional setting, so I assume only a small fraction of their MAU use it.
It’s not a setting, it’s like their version of an incognito tab. You can right click a link to “open in tor”
They also have private windows without Tor and the users probably found out that Tor takes quite longer and works only half the time compared to the ordinary private window, so I wouldn't get my hopes up that it is adopted massively.
(Still, it's great they have done that.)
Afaik, it does not use Tor from within the browser, but uses a proxy server into Tor. That could have changed though.
It runs a TOR client locally and proxies all connections through that. It does not implement the privacy protections of the TOR browser tho.
Basically, using the TOR network as a VPN.
Not a VPN, TOR just runs as a SOCKS proxy on whatever device you're using[0]. Replacing the actual network stack at OS level was considered but iirc was decided against because it would require admin permissions.
The TOR browser and Brave do the exact same thing, it's just that the TOR browser is configured to not store anything and to make sure it's fingerprint to other sites is as generic as possible (this is also why TOR warns you about changing window size, it un-generalizes that fingerprint). Both ultimately are conveniences because messing with SOCKS proxy settings is rather unfriendly for most users.
If you use a Linux distro, I'd recommend checking out torsocks[1], it's a shared library + a shell script that lets you "onion-ify" any application pretty easily.
[0]: This also means you can connect basically every mainstream browser to TOR if you know the port the SOCKS proxy is running on.
It would certainly make sense from a marketing perspective to claim it's using tor, and then have a tor-proxy service (think onion.cab) use tor for hidden services and also attempt to use tor for clearnet traffic but fail back to regular proxy if it fails.
If it were directly using tor then I'd have to agree that most people wouldn't use it. Only those that are technical enough to understand what's going on and the security aspects. But they wouldn't be using Brave for the Tor functionality, they'd be using Tor Browser.
Wow this is really cool. I need to look into Brave again.
I don't see this on Android. I also can't seem to locate any related settings.
This is a wrong conception. Using tor without Tor browser will make you stand out much more, since you're using a different browser. Not talking about non-browsers connections.