Am I wrong here or is everyone missing the one point that can't be worked around.  While the download may not be determined due to encryption, and the source may not be trackable due to anonymizers, to make the connection in the first place, the router assigns (albit temporarily in the case of DHCP) the IP address to a MAC address.  This guarantees that the routing goes to the right place (assuming the IP address doesn't point to more than one address, but that is another issue that shows immediately to at least one person with that address).  Therefore, with even the most basic logging, all sources, even wireless, has access to the MAC address of that interface.

THEORETICAL DISCUSSION POINT HERE - MAY OR MAY NOT BE FEASIBLE IN REALITY!

Once you have the MAC address, you can then follow MAC address connections and if you use wireless in your house regularly, you can determine where that MAC address connects most of the time.  Even if not, you can narrow it to a specific location and frequent any location that seems to show a regular connection to the hotspot.  Once you see that connection made, you found the person.

/THEORY

Is this time consuming - absolutely.  Will it happen?  Probably not.  Is it possible in reality?  This I do not know, as you would essentially have to gain access to each hotspot and search the history to track the MAC Address.  This would require a HUGE amount of resources and probably a ton of cooperation that may or may not be available.  Would someone attempt this for an illegal torrent, doubt it.  For National Security, Weapons trafficking, or espionage?  Not so doubtful.  The real question here is can it happen vs. how likely is it to happen.

-steeladept (June 16, 2010, 07:21 AM)

Unfortunately, MAC addresses are also very easily spoofed. I can only assume anyone doing espionage or anything of that sort would have covered that weak spot. There are probably easier ways to track a person down then the method you describe. In theory, this would be workable, but practically it will just take too much time.

Actually, I think that the more traffic there is on TOR, the better it is. More nodes means higher reliability and faster, while more traffic means more noise to obscure your signal. So no matter what people are using it for, the fact that they are using it makes it better.

Or do you mean that ISPs might decide to murder the baby when they throw out the bath water by banning TOR traffic altogether and blame it on file sharing?

-Renegade (June 16, 2010, 12:51 AM)

No, the problem is that Tor relies on its users to route traffic through the network, and if you use BitTorrent over it, you inevitably hog everyone's bandwidth and make things slower for everyone. Also, I think that ISPs can't actually ban Tor because it uses encryption, and also because it does not really have a predictable traffic pattern (unlike BitTorrent).

Here's another good link for info about lucid dreaming: Lucid Dreaming @ Wikibooks

Man why do you people have so much more interesting dreams than me? The only slightly interesting ones involved me dreaming that I woke up and went on my daily routine.

Dreams = life for me I suppose. sigh~