Relays can be malicious and try to tamper with the data. Think of Tor relay encryption like Signal's E2E encryption, where the relays are analogous to Signal's servers. You want to ensure they can neither see what you sent (confidentiality) nor modify it without detection (integrity).
This FUD comes up whenever Tor is mentioned on Hacker News. The answer is: let's say you think Tor isn't 100% flawless. What are you going to do? Not use Tor? It's better than any other option.
What you'd do is that you'd write a distributed remailer where fixed-size messages are sent on fixed timeslots, possibly with some noise in when it's transmitted, with a message always being sent on its timeslot, even if a dummy message must be sent.
I've been writing a system like this in Erlang, intended to be short enough that you can take a picture of the source code and then type it in by hand in a reasonable amount of time, as a sort of protest against Chat Control. I'm not sure I'm going to release it-- after all, they haven't passed it yet, and there are all sorts of problems that this thing could needlessly accelerate, but I've started fiddling with it more intensively recently.
While there aren't as many services available, there are alternatives to Tor. Veilid on the protocol level seems to be quite promising, and I2P and other networks also provide some Tor-like features.
If you're trying to browse the web then you won't find many alternatives, but if you're looking to avoid the authorities doing some data exchange, you have options.
Readit News
Why is this necessary if every layer of the onion is a trustable encrypted link?
Small typo: “observing predicatable changes“
Deleted Comment
I’m not sure what you expect HN readers to do about the typo. There is a comment section on the blog itself :)
Dead Comment
High stakes (military / nation state scale): no
I've been writing a system like this in Erlang, intended to be short enough that you can take a picture of the source code and then type it in by hand in a reasonable amount of time, as a sort of protest against Chat Control. I'm not sure I'm going to release it-- after all, they haven't passed it yet, and there are all sorts of problems that this thing could needlessly accelerate, but I've started fiddling with it more intensively recently.
If you're trying to browse the web then you won't find many alternatives, but if you're looking to avoid the authorities doing some data exchange, you have options.