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Operating a Tor Relay

birb007.github.io

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Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#31

Post by z3j4e »

seven4 wrote: post #3

I often wonder what incentives drive people to run TOR exit nodes; the risk even if remote of getting raided is enough to stop most I'd imagine. Got me thinking on the legal implications and interestingly TOR doesn't recommend running an exit node at home - Found this FAQ quite interesting https://2019.www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en Particularly ~ Has anyone ever been sued or prosecuted for running Tor?…

I think that is one of the reasons why in Germany a registered association named "Zwiebelfreunde e.V." (can be translated to "Onion friends") was founded.

By this it is a legal entity and legal trouble can be handled better than if its against a person but the members of the board still gets trouble with the law. Not long ago they were raided because they were treated as witnesses in a case. (Yes, in Germany even as a witness you can be raided ...)

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#32

Post by als0 »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #23
seven4 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. What - if any costs are involved for you?

I am running a couple of relays. There are no costs if your servers have spare resources available. The tor daemon barely eats anything, and you can always limit how much bandwidth it's allowed to use. Please spend half an hour and set up a relay if you can, it doesn't help as much as running an exit node, but it's still something.

Which country do you operate in? One issue in some of the Western world is that your IP becomes blacklisted by some websites. There's also the issue that some ISPs cut you off for running a relay (yes, not an exit node).

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#33

Post by bilegeek »

minimalist wrote: post #9
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Tor is a project I want to like and support, but can’t. I feel (and I have no evidence) that for every 1 person using it to protect their privacy, 20 are using it for despicable purposes. I would love to be proved wrong on this. I don’t want to shut it down, but at the same time I don’t feel I can personally or technically support it.

FWIW, I have been doing all of my non-multimedia browsing over Tor for about a decade now. It provides cover traffic for people who actually need the anonymity and I feel like it is a step in the right direction to frustrate state and corporate surveillance. Some sites break, but I have observed less and less sites breaking compared to a few years ago. Also browsing is fast enough as to not be distracting, it is like…

Out of curiosity, since you log into accounts via Tor, are you still concerned about exit node snooping these days? Do you enable the strict mode in HTTPS Everywhere, or do you trust that site-enforced HTTPS is enough?

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#34

Post by michaelt »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #23
seven4 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. What - if any costs are involved for you?

I am running a couple of relays. There are no costs if your servers have spare resources available. The tor daemon barely eats anything, and you can always limit how much bandwidth it's allowed to use. Please spend half an hour and set up a relay if you can, it doesn't help as much as running an exit node, but it's still something.

I know you get a lot of hassle/blocking if you're a Tor exit node - do you get some of the same problems being a middle relay, just by virtue of appearing in lists of tor nodes?

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#35

Post by vbezhenar »

praptak wrote: post #13

I have doubts about running a relay on a VPS, or on any other machine that I don't physically control for that matter. Tor security relies on multiple nodes being hard to seize synchronously. This property goes away if the majority of people run their nodes as virtual machines on infrastructure provided by a few cloud providers.

There are thousands of VPS hosters, not a few.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#36

Post by vbezhenar »

seven4 wrote: post #3

I often wonder what incentives drive people to run TOR exit nodes; the risk even if remote of getting raided is enough to stop most I'd imagine. Got me thinking on the legal implications and interestingly TOR doesn't recommend running an exit node at home - Found this FAQ quite interesting https://2019.www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en Particularly ~ Has anyone ever been sued or prosecuted for running Tor?…

One reason would be to sniff cleartext traffic and extract useful info from it.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#37

Post by P-ala-din »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Tor is a project I want to like and support, but can’t. I feel (and I have no evidence) that for every 1 person using it to protect their privacy, 20 are using it for despicable purposes. I would love to be proved wrong on this. I don’t want to shut it down, but at the same time I don’t feel I can personally or technically support it.

I think we call things rights only if someone potentially wants to take them. If no one ever took or would ever take a specific right from anyone, I don't see what's the point of calling that a right.

for every right, there are situations where someone stands to gain something from denying it. Therefore financial gain, stopping the bad guys are not in themselves sufficient excuse to deny innocent people their rights.

This admittedly causes an asymmetry making the abolition of rights much costlier than their recognition.

but I'd argue that's a good thing, as it reduces ladder pulling where people only recognize rights in the periods where it suits them. And in the long run results in people having more recognized rights.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#38

Post by IngoBlechschmid »

bilegeek wrote: post #33
minimalist wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, I have been doing all of my non-multimedia browsing over Tor for about a decade now. It provides cover traffic for people who actually need the anonymity and I feel like it is a step in the right direction to frustrate state and corporate surveillance. Some sites break, but I have observed less and less sites breaking compared to a few years ago. Also browsing is fast enough as to not be distracting, it is like…

Out of curiosity, since you log into accounts via Tor, are you still concerned about exit node snooping these days? Do you enable the strict mode in HTTPS Everywhere, or do you trust that site-enforced HTTPS is enough?

Not the grandparent, but I've been doing the same (almost only for a couple of years) and yes I trust site-enforced HTTPS.

To anyone who last tried Tor years ago: It really got quite fast. I don't notice a difference to my native connection.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#39

Post by birb007 »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Tor is a project I want to like and support, but can’t. I feel (and I have no evidence) that for every 1 person using it to protect their privacy, 20 are using it for despicable purposes. I would love to be proved wrong on this. I don’t want to shut it down, but at the same time I don’t feel I can personally or technically support it.

Author here. I thought of it as "is one person escaping an authoritarian regime to communicate freely worth more or less than ten people buying drugs?". A criminal will always find another way to engage in criminal activities, but can a news reporter or activist find another safe way to communicate? I felt as though the benefits to users using tor for legitimate purposes, outweighed the users who used tor maliciously.
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