The dangers of operating a Tor exit node • Hacker News Board

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#31

Post by radu_floricica » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 10:36 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #16

cousin_it wrote: post #8

Congratulations, now you understand who benefited when the media created the pedophilia scare. I confess to being a total conspiracy theory nut on this topic, and go out of my way to defend "sex offenders" in any online discussion I come across. Sadly this is not enough. We're up against a monstrous evil machine made up of mostly good and well-intentioned humans and there's no apparent way to defeat it. Think about i…

This stopped being about the defense of the vulnerable long ago. Once the laws were put in place that make it illegal to show non-children as if they were children, it became thoughtcrime, the persecution of people because they think differently than the rest of society. If a photograph shows an adult dressed as a child, or is entirely computer generated, then sure it's yucky, but what's the harm? So it seems like on…

I'd go a step further and say the yuckyness is in some cases purely subjective. You probably know about the guy who got into hot water over his manga collection. This is a clear example of a culture clash. For an american, or european, everything involving drawings of children in sexual contexts is at least distasteful. Strange as it may seem, there are cultures where "sexy" is closer to cute then to porn.

It's probably one of those things which 60 years after will sound _really_ weird, like blacks had separated restrooms or homosexuals liked to rape little boys.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#32

Post by mikedouglas » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 10:38 PM UTC

anamax wrote: post #26

ciupicri wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence. The part that sucks the most in this story is the period of time for which his computer was seized. It was absurd to seize his computer for 4 months.

> Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence. Why would police suspicion of an IP address trigger any knowlege by a miscreant who uses said IP address? (While miscreants who know that they're being watched may do something, surely police can know a potential suspect's IP address and gather additional evide…

But what "additional evidence"? They enough evidence to link the ip address to a serious felony. If you lend someone your car, and they try to drive it across the border with 20kg of cocaine, expect them to come crashing through your door.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#33

Post by radu_floricica » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 10:41 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #21

josefresco wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would think that the Police, or a judge in particular (who allows this warrant) would require at least one more piece of cooberating evidence before 'breaking someone's door down'.

Like what? The thing is, if he was a real paedophile they would have needed to act fast before other harm was done and before he would destroy any evidence. The part that sucks the most in this story is the period of time for which his computer was seized. It was absurd to seize his computer for 4 months.

That's the funny thing. About what harm exactly are we talking about? If it's downloading "illegal material", then the harm was done a long time before. If it's producing, then evidence should be abundant, and the best strategy would be to gather more evidence before alarming him.

But you see, he wasn't even told the offense. And neither have we. That's the magic of child porn - you'll never see a journalist trying to dig deeper into such cases.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#34

Post by mikedouglas » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 10:43 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #19

mikedouglas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the process screw up here? Regardless whether he was running a Tor server or not, you don't think that the link between his IP address and child pornography was enough to warrant a search?

This has always been inherent in "the process." It's just that child pornography is particularly easy to vilify, as it likely should be. But in the past, there have been similar scares using witches, communists, homosexuals. Now there are Nazis and child pornographers. (Heck, I've even seen people trying to vilify Nazi child pornographers!) I think more attention should be placed on the broader issue of Human Traffic…

Right, but the 'scare' is an orthogonal issue to how law enforcement acted in this instance.I'd expect the same response whether it was human trafficking, stock fraud or racketeering.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#35

Post by radu_floricica » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 10:50 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #19

mikedouglas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did the process screw up here? Regardless whether he was running a Tor server or not, you don't think that the link between his IP address and child pornography was enough to warrant a search?

This has always been inherent in "the process." It's just that child pornography is particularly easy to vilify, as it likely should be. But in the past, there have been similar scares using witches, communists, homosexuals. Now there are Nazis and child pornographers. (Heck, I've even seen people trying to vilify Nazi child pornographers!) I think more attention should be placed on the broader issue of Human Traffic…

Human trafficking is real (I was actually offered to buy someone once), but in child abuse cases it's usually a parent or somebody close to the family.

I wouldn't be surprised if it would be easier to identify them if distributing child porn would not be illegal. I cannot imagine somebody starting to abuse their child in order to post a video. But I can easily imagine somebody who's already been abusing the child taping it.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#36

Post by radu_floricica » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 10:52 PM UTC

cstejerean wrote: post #7

What I'd like to see is a way to enforce restrictions on the destinations you're willing to route as an exit node. I'm all for giving people living under restrictive regimes access to things like Wikipedia, but I don't particularly care to enable anonymous access to child pornography.

Either you have freedom of information, or you don't. All you're saying is that you want to write the rules yourself.

edit: What I mean, is it's a slippery slope. If you do the selection by yourself, you'll let out a lot of good stuff. If you trust somebody else to do the selection, that someone will be in time important enough to become either corrupt or a target, or both. Just imagine google excluding sites from its index on some subjective criteria.

You can't solve this kind of problem by limiting access to information. It's simply a bad strategy from the start, and like any design mistake it creates problems farther and farther away, when the issue is only one: a bunch of bits have been made illegal.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#37

Post by poutine » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 11:54 PM UTC

jonas_b wrote: post #10

poutine wrote: post #5

Because of the ignorance of the police you need to be nuts to run a Tor exit node. I don't much see the point in Tor anyhow, you want to be anonymous for some reason just use an unsecured WIFI AP or a proxy in another country, easy enough.

I think unsecured WIFI AP in Burma or China is a very precious commodity, if it even exists.

Then you think very wrong. It's trivial to find open WIFI all over China. Most restaurants and coffee shops have it.

I can see several from my apartment.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#38

Post by tectonic » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 11:56 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #18

eli wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, obviously a blacklist wouldn't work, so are you suggesting a whitelist? Seems like that would seriously reduce the usefulness. How would you know what foreign-language dissident news sites to include?

What about the ability to spread out a particular request to many exit nodes? This would probably require the establishment of new formats and protocols. How about image formats with the same sort of information as Bittorrent? (Can someone be prosecuted for downloading a fraction of something?) As mentioned in the Rivest article posted recently, there are also "packaging transforms" that allow one to divide informati…

The owner of the Tor exit node would still be in the logs, even if they only downloaded part of a file.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#39

Post by katz » Sat, Mar 21, 2009, 11:59 PM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #8

Congratulations, now you understand who benefited when the media created the pedophilia scare. I confess to being a total conspiracy theory nut on this topic, and go out of my way to defend "sex offenders" in any online discussion I come across. Sadly this is not enough. We're up against a monstrous evil machine made up of mostly good and well-intentioned humans and there's no apparent way to defeat it. Think about i…

The problem with paedophilia is that it is extremely difficult to enforce. It is not as if a 5 year old kid will walk up to a police station and file a complaint. The internet made it near impossible to enforce paedophilia laws.

If the cops have to cause a mild inconvenience to 50 people to successfully prosecute one bad guy - then so be it.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#40

Post by chris11 » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 12:08 AM UTC

cstejerean wrote: post #7

What I'd like to see is a way to enforce restrictions on the destinations you're willing to route as an exit node. I'm all for giving people living under restrictive regimes access to things like Wikipedia, but I don't particularly care to enable anonymous access to child pornography.

I agree with you. I would be extremely uncomfortable knowing that I might be enabling access to child porn.

But you might have problems legally if you take any responsibility for the kind of traffic that goes through your node. If you try to block anything, that might be implying legally that you have some responsibility for the traffic that goes through the node.

So a whitelist would be best, and you better be sure that every single thing on the sites on your whitelist is legal in your home country. For example, Australia has censored a wikileaks page. So you wouldn't want to allow access to that wikileaks page if you were in Australia.

Right now, you can use Google to find pirated material. You can even limit the file type to torrents. Google's main defense is that it has legal uses, and it is not responsible for policing files on other sites.