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The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

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Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#51

Post by poutine »

gommm wrote: post #47
poutine wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Anyone that cares can access the Internet at large in China. There's many http proxies that work quite fine. Most expats that care use a VPN tunnel to a service or corporate HQ. The rare person uses Tor but it's generally disfavored because it's unreliable and slow.

This is not the problem however. The vast majority of Chinese people in general don't really care about censorship. Far more due to language and culture than censorship the Internet is mostly an internal Chinese thing to Chinese for the purposes of entertainment, not information. Many view state censorship as doing its job to protect the majority from corrupt western influences.

But it seems most people in the west would like to prefer to imagine jackbooted thugs keeping the masses down through coercion and fear. The truth is rather worse, that of apathy, ignorance and a collectivist submission to authority.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#52

Post by Raphael »

greendestiny wrote: post #50
radu_floricica wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 arg…

Bits are information, so it makes sense to use them as evidence of a crime, but can the bits themselves really constitute a crime?

"Ooh, you put a zero next to that one. Naughty, naughty."

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#53

Post by anamax »

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.

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

"mild inconvenience"?

If it's a "mild inconvenience", surely you won't mind paying for n instances, for non-trivial n. You've used 50 above, so let's start there.

Are you personally willing to pay for the "mild inconvenience" suffered by 50 innocent people?

What? You're not willing to pay? You're only willing for other people to pay?

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#54

Post by stcredzero »

krakensden wrote: post #49
stcredzero wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you can even get prepaid data time for iPhones.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#56

Post by katz »

jibiki wrote: post #44
katz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

> think that's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

The problem is this: either something is a crime and the police enforce it or something is illegal. Just because it is difficult to enforce a crime does not mean that the crime should not be enforced.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#57

Post by katz »

anamax wrote: post #53
katz wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If the cops have to cause a mild inconvenience to 50 people to successfully prosecute one bad guy - then so be it. "mild inconvenience"? If it's a "mild inconvenience", surely you won't mind paying for n instances, for non-trivial n. You've used 50 above, so let's start there. Are you personally willing to pay for the "mild inconvenience" suffered by 50 innocent people? What? You're not willing to pay? You're only…

> If it's a "mild inconvenience", surely you won't mind paying for n instances, for non-trivial n.

For all crimes there is a false search rate. A good example is a normal drug "bust" or a stolen property bust.

And yes - with the enforcement of most laws there is an inconvenience. A good example is a traffic stop - they check your license, check if the driver is drunk, check if the car is stolen, check for outstanding warrants of arrest and they may search the car.

What is the right number of car stops by police to enforce the law?

CP is more difficult because people can do this without going outside the home. That just means that the police should occasionally check inside the home.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#58

Post by anamax »

katz wrote: post #57
anamax wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the cops have to cause a mild inconvenience to 50 people to successfully prosecute one bad guy - then so be it. "mild inconvenience"? If it's a "mild inconvenience", surely you won't mind paying for n instances, for non-trivial n. You've used 50 above, so let's start there. Are you personally willing to pay for the "mild inconvenience" suffered by 50 innocent people? What? You're not willing to pay? You're only…

> If it's a "mild inconvenience", surely you won't mind paying for n instances, for non-trivial n. For all crimes there is a false search rate. A good example is a normal drug "bust" or a stolen property bust. And yes - with the enforcement of most laws there is an inconvenience. A good example is a traffic stop - they check your license, check if the driver is drunk, check if the car is stolen, check for outstanding…

I'm not questioning that it's an inconvenience or that there will be false positives.

I'm pointing out that "mild" is inaccurate.

In ducking my question of how many of these "mild inconveniences" you're willing to pay for, you concede that point.

Let me suggest that the more costly the inconvenience, the lower the acceptable false positive rate. And, if the inconvenience is serious enough, the folks inconvenienced should be compensated. (And, no, you don't get to bargain away the compensation by letting them off of something else that you wouldn't have found without the false positive.)

One benefit from compensating folks who are "inconvenienced" is that forces the relevant parties to do a better job in minimizing the total cost (which is proportional to the false positive rate multiplied by the cost of the inconvenience).

It's amazing how people's priorities depend on who's paying.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#59

Post by orc »

huhtenberg wrote: post #6
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.

> Because of the ignorance of the police you need to be nuts to run a Tor exit node. You'd be nuts to do that because 90% of the traffic going through your node will warrant legit police interest.

So are you saying that 90% of the people who want privacy want it for illegal reasons? Then you won't mind if I read all your email?

That's what I thought.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#60

Post by alecco »

cdr wrote: post #55
alecco wrote: post #4

Blogspam, flagged. Original: http://calumog.wordpress.com/2009/03/18/why-you-need-balls-o...

It looks like the link now points there; I assume it was fixed. Shouldn't this comment be deleted now if that's the case?

I'd love to, but I can't delete it now. (Maybe after a while you can't or after a reply?)
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