I have a lot of bandwidth but don't want to spend money on hosting. Has anyone successfully hosted on rasberry pi ?
Operating a Tor Relay
41–50 of 104 posts
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#42I 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.
And the big 3 are more expensive wrt traffic, so I could imagine most nodes are run on smaller providers with cheaper bandwidth.
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#43I 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…
Not just in Germany. US providers can also be forced to hand over data to be used in cases against others. It's just usually not done with a raid since providers will turn over data when asked.
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#44I 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 ran few exit nodes several years ago on 3rd world country VPS hoster with bitcoin payments and fake data. They had never care until abuse notice from Korean Government during some crime investigation.
BTW, they didn't even ban my account, just froze the external IP address of the node and ask to rent new VPS instance because they needed to answer to the legal letter.
That drops the reputation of the node (the longer node is staying online, the more it is trusted by network), but it's okay.
Stay free!
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#45Tor 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…
I'd be less concerned about drugs and more about human trafficking or child pornography.
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#46I 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.
I feel the same way. The main benefit of a VPS is that they're typically cheap, resource sufficient, and hosted somewhere that isn't your residence. There is an additional benefit, you can spin up a VPS within an hour then deploy a docker image to resume your node. However, a hosting provider may ban tor activity then subsequently disable services for accounts running tor nodes (this is alleviated by the aforementioned quick deployment).
The tor project recommends against using OVH and Hetzner because they have such a large AS presence in the tor network [1]. The tor project also maintains a list of ISPs and they're "friendliness" [2] - some of which are totally anonymous. Every relay operator should familiarise themselves with the ISP page when deploying a relay. Another diversity problem extends to the OSs themselves, Debian has an overwhelming presence [3].
[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorRelayGuide#... [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP... [3] https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/#os-distribution-relays
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#47I 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.
How many of those VPS hosters rely on infrastructure from OVH, Hetzner, ColoCrossing, Azure, AWS, or GCP?
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#48Tor 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.
And probably 19 out of 20 of those despicable purposes involve buying weed edibles and shrooms.
But if the 20th is used for child pornography or human trafficking it might not matter that the other 19th just want to get high.
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#49The screen shot at the bottom of the post is an i3 window manager with title bar hidden. Did not knew titlebar can be hidden in i3 window manager. Its 2 line configuration https://gist.github.com/lirenlin/9892945 .
I love HN for this. Read a blog post about Tor, come to the comments, and learn something new about i3. Thank you for sharing.
Re: Operating a Tor Relay
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really believe 95% of cash transaction are for despicable purposes?
It's actually not that far of the mark. There's a LOT more cash out there than you probably think, and no one really know where is it and what's it being used for. As an example, 80% of the bills in circulation in the US are 100$ bills. It's so much cash that "The average person would be having to carry around 35 or 36 of them in their house or in their wallet. This is for every man, woman, and child." And according…
Most likely, the vast majority are not in circulation but stored somewhere and are outside the US anyway. A stack of $100 bills is probably the best long-term investment for illegal funds that will be used at some point in the future. It's relatively easy to transport, valid until eternity (other than e.g. UK where bills are taken out of circulation every few years or decades) and accepted world wide.