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

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#41

Post by wmf » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 12:17 AM 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…

Remixing the bits doesn't really change anything.

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=506986

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#42

Post by ygcfububyuf » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 12:26 AM UTC

katz wrote: post #39

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.

And if the cops have to monitor all your internet traffic, phone calls, and track your location 24x7 with CCTV - to prosecute one bad guy?

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#43

Post by eli » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 12:29 AM UTC

tlrobinson wrote: post #27

stcredzero wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the server supports HTTP Range headers you can easily download portions of files. I'm not sure what percentage of servers do, though.

Yeah, I think I'd prefer not to have my IP address downloading "portions" of child pornography, thanks.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#44

Post by jibiki » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 12:33 AM UTC

katz wrote: post #39

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.

From what people say, the police are remarkably unsuccessful at prosecuting CP producers and distributors. They're good at prosecuting consumers, but I think that's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon. (Of course, fighting crime is always like that...)

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#45

Post by anamax » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 2:31 AM UTC

mikedouglas wrote: post #32

anamax wrote: post #26

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. 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.

The last time I looked, my car wasn't much like a computer connected to the internet. Since they're going to claim technical expertise in the warrant ....

In any event, I was addressing the assumption that quick action is required as soon as the police know an IP address. It isn't.

As to the additional evidence, some indication that it was actually received at the guy's computer. After all, I'm pretty sure that the police don't raid the post office.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#46

Post by raquo » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 3:17 AM 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…

You can not fight the materialization of thoughts without fighting these thoughts. If enough people think X, X will be normal sooner or later, even if it was illegal. It is normal that Women and minorities have equal rights with white men now (on paper at least), in contrast to 100 years ago. Think pedophiles won't be normal in 50 years? Sounds perfectly plausible to me.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#47

Post by gommm » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 3:46 AM UTC

poutine wrote: post #37

jonas_b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But, of course, the problem is that even with an open wifi there are quite a few websites that are blocked by the great firewall...

So using an open wifi doesn't solve the problem the way tor does. The other way is to have a server outside of china and use ssh to proxy through it but how many have a server they can access like that...

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#48

Post by param » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 4:18 AM UTC

raquo wrote: post #46

CWuestefeld wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You can not fight the materialization of thoughts without fighting these thoughts. If enough people think X, X will be normal sooner or later, even if it was illegal. It is normal that Women and minorities have equal rights with white men now (on paper at least), in contrast to 100 years ago. Think pedophiles won't be normal in 50 years? Sounds perfectly plausible to me.

if enough (democratically enough) people think that pedophilia is ok, why would it be wrong to legalize it? As a second counter argument, lot of people transiently have thoughts to kill, but its not legal even today.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#49

Post by krakensden » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 4:42 AM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #20

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.

Better yet, a botnet of 3G smartphones. This might be useful enough that some criminal organization might actually buy smartphones in bulk to do this, instead of trying to hack them. (Maybe even manufacture them? These things wouldn't even need input devices and displays.) Pay truckers or bus drivers to carry them around in cities, and program the nodes to periodically shut themselves off. Combine this with a mechani…

Can you get prepaid internet access though? Otherwise, each phone has to be linked to a social security number (at least in the US), which seems like it would put a damper on the whole thing.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#50

Post by greendestiny » Sun, Mar 22, 2009, 5:22 AM UTC

radu_floricica wrote: post #36

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 it…

"a bunch of bits have been made illegal"

I strongly disagree with this idea that I've seen a few times, that somehow the law is irrationally and ridiculously making bits illegal whether in copyright or in pornography. Child pornography is illegal whether its printed on paper or stored as bits. That somehow it shouldn't be a crime just because of the fact that bits can be used to represent anything is a really bad argument.