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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

#11

Post by mikedouglas »

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…

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?

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#12

Post by graemep »

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…

I would definitely blame journalists and the government. They did NOT report the dangers of paedophiles honestly. They grossly exaggerated the level of risk and mislead people about the sources of risk ("stranger danger").

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#13

Post by eli »

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.

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?

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#14

Post by josefresco »

mikedouglas wrote: post #11
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…

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?

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'.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#15

Post by mahmud »

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.

China has some open WIFI services (I deployed some FON routers in South China.) I have also been to Burma last year, and the biggest risk there is not technological censorship but human snitches. Burma is a massive country, some parts of which are controlled by the opposition groups, but in government strong-holds, you probably wouldn't find wifi, much less an unsecured one.

In any case, do not use someone's network to do something that might get them killed.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#16

Post by CWuestefeld »

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 one place to break the cycle of hysteria is through lawmakers, to roll back the thoughtcrime laws to the level that they're only protecting the vulnerable rather than punishing people for having weird thoughts.

(Off topic: Of course, the same things can be said about the war on drugs, and the obvious damage that it has done, but lawmakers aren't exactly falling over each other to undo their damage in that area either)

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#18

Post by stcredzero »

eli wrote: post #13
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.

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 information up into n parts, such that all n parts must be provided to retrieve it.

I am surprised that such protocols haven't been devised yet. Yes, this would enable those engaged in child pornography. But those so engaged will just concoct yet another mish-mash of obscurity in any case. (Like using encrypted Windows Remote Desktop connections to virtual servers with encrypted archives on them.)

Just because Bittorrent is used by so-called "pirates," doesn't invalidate it or its use to distribute ISOs of Linux distributions. Likewise, such protocols would patch TOR's weakness at its exit nodes.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#19

Post by stcredzero »

mikedouglas wrote: post #11
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…

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 Trafficking. We know this is real, and child pornography constitutes some fraction of it. It's just a lot easier for the police to get ahold of an IP and break down somebody's door.

Re: The dangers of operating a Tor exit node

#20

Post by stcredzero »

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 mechanism like TOR, and I'm not sure how you're going to prosecute. (Are judges going to issue warrants based on MAC address?)
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