Tor: The Dark World

Operation Onymous appeared to strike a big blow against the Deep Web, but as you would probably expect in such matters, not everything is what it seems.

Tor, the anonymising web protocol that underpins the so-called 'Deep Web' has been on the radar of law enforcement on both sides of the Atlantic for a good while now. However, last year's arrest of Ross Albricht, the man allegedly behind the infamous Silk Road online marketplace and known online as 'Dread Pirate Roberts', appeared to mark an escalation in efforts to bring law to its wild west nature. While other sites popped up to replace Silk Road (most notably Silk Road 2.0 - SR2 from now on), many of them seemed to have been seized in a multinational police operation a few weeks ago, apparently highlighting just how far investigative tactics have come in a year. It may not have been as successful as was first trumpeted, though.

What does it all mean for Tor going forward? Is law enforcement circumventing its efforts to create an anonymous online service, and is its aim of creating an untrackable web network just a pipe dream? If so, what does it mean not only for criminals but for the dissidents, activists, whistleblowers and journalists that have also turned to this technology in the face of increasing surveillance?

Affinity Designer

Could this be a genuine alternative to Illustrator?

Since Macromedia Freehand was discontinued in 2007, Mac creatives have craved an alternative to the highcost Adobe Illustrator, and with Serif’s Affinity Designer, they may finally have one. Part of a suite of new apps that will see image-editing and design tools released in the coming year, Affinity Designer is created specifically for the Mac and, as such, is optimised for OS X. It offers perfectly smooth panning and zooming, and more than 1,000,000% zoom (you read that correctly), so you can close in on the finest detail without a loss in quality. It ran well on our 2012 MacBook Pro, even with complex multi-layered images.