Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Operating a Tor Relay

birb007.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 104 posts

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#21

Post by adrianN »

maltalex wrote: post #18
wolco wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised by who uses it. Iran and other places have a serious need for tor. https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-table.html

Yes, many places have a serious need for Tor. But the bridge stats are misleading because bridges are exclusivity for circumventing censorship. The stats for tor relays [0] are different: United States 418568 (20.37 %) Russia 335382 (16.32 %) Germany 172251 (8.38 %) France 92643 (4.51 %) Netherlands 76496 (3.72 %) United Kingdom 68674 (3.34 %) Indonesia 61917 (3.01 %) Ukraine 50331 (2.45 %) Canada 48246 (2.35 %) Indi…

You should normalize those numbers for population at least, or better for share of non-Tor traffic.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#23

Post by throwaway8941 »

seven4 wrote: post #6
Izmaki wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve read [citation needed] that some people enjoy doing it because they want to give (back) to the community and because they would like to try having to deal with anything from spam complaints (e.g. Automatically) and legetimate complaints and requests. Maybe also because “somebody has to”. :) For me, my middle relay is sufficient entertainment. It’s like a digital pet that doesn’t need much attention except an upd…

Interesting, thanks for sharing. What - if any costs are involved for you?

I am running a couple of relays. There are no costs if your servers have spare resources available. The tor daemon barely eats anything, and you can always limit how much bandwidth it's allowed to use. Please spend half an hour and set up a relay if you can, it doesn't help as much as running an exit node, but it's still something.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#24

Post by maltalex »

adrianN wrote: post #19
dimator wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could say the same for cash.

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 to the federal reserve, the demand for large bills comes mostly from border states - Florida, California and Texas.

Source: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/still-using-cash/

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#26

Post by deathgrips »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Tor 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.

If you feel like people use technology for despicable purposes, wouldn't you also think that bad governments would do even worse things if Tor did not exist?

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#27

Post by clort »

maltalex wrote: post #24
adrianN wrote: post #19

Earlier 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…

Its very likely skewed, such that 95% of the transactions are innocent but 95% of the value is despicable.

(for some value of 95%)

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#28

Post by GoblinSlayer »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Tor 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.

Same things are said about all encryption technologies. And kitchen knife is the most popular murder weapon.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#29

Post by lifty »

throwaway8941 wrote: post #23
seven4 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for sharing. What - if any costs are involved for you?

I am running a couple of relays. There are no costs if your servers have spare resources available. The tor daemon barely eats anything, and you can always limit how much bandwidth it's allowed to use. Please spend half an hour and set up a relay if you can, it doesn't help as much as running an exit node, but it's still something.

Thanks for doing that! I think a viable long term strategy to increase the health of the Tor network, is to increase the number of relays (not exit nodes) and make it easier for companies/websites to expose their services as native Tor services. That way the amount of bandwidth insides the Tor network would increase, without exposing anyone to increased liability.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#30

Post by cyphar »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #2

Tor 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.

I highly doubt that 95% are using it for despicable purposes, so I have no ethical concerns with running a Tor relay at home, using Tor regularly, and financially supporting the Tor project.

Why? Well, the most obvious "usable for despicable purposes" feature is .onion services. Today, .onion service traffic makes up about 2% of Tor traffic[1] and the largest .onion service by far is Facebook[2] (served at https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/). So even if we assume that all traffic other than to Facebook is for nefarious purposes (which is not correct given that we know there are other very popular and legal services operating as .onion services), you're looking at much less than 2% of all Tor traffic at best being nefarious. I doubt that the same statistic for clearnet traffic is significantly better.

Now, you might argue that most of the clearnet browsing over Tor is nefarious and that focusing on Onion services is a distraction. But that doesn't really match up with reality either. CloudFlare has claimed in the past that 94% of (clearnet) Tor traffic they see is malicious (meaning "DDoS or spam" not "illegal or immoral content")[3] but they provided no justification for this figure, and at the same time Akamai published a study[4] which found that there is no statistically significant difference when it comes to e-commerce behaviour when comparing Tor users and the regular internet. The Tor Project postulated[5] that this claim by CloudFlare was based on them marking exit nodes as being malicious rather than individual connections from exit nodes and CloudFlare hasn't really responded to that in the past 4 years.

My point is that the 95% figure you posited doesn't pass the sniff test. That means that 1.9 million of the daily users of Tor are all using it for nefarious purposes. If you just count a handful of countries with well-known internet censorship (Brazil, Venezuela, Iran, Egypt, and China) you already have passed the 5% mark of daily Tor users.

[1]: If you compare the onion service and total daily Tor traffic (https://metrics.torproject.org/), you find that it's about 4 Gbit/s out of a total 200 Gbit/s -- so around 2% at time of writing.

[2]: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-over-tor/1-million-p...

[3]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

[4]: https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/state-of-t...

[5]: https://blog.torproject.org/trouble-cloudflare

Post reply on HN