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Operating a Tor Relay

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Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#81

Post by ed25519FUUU »

Izmaki wrote: post #4
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 imagine the same is true for the use of guns. I’ve operated a middle/guard relay for little over a year now 24/7, and I keep doing it for that one person who genuinely need it.

Gun is a good analogy I think, and I do support personal gun ownership. But I wouldn’t loan people my gun unless I was 100% sure they wouldn’t use it for anything illegal. Even 99.999% doesn’t really cut it for me.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#82

Post by ed25519FUUU »

dependenttypes wrote: post #15
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.

e-crimes are victimless crimes

If someone was sharing a nude photo of you as a child for sexual purposes, you would not consider yourself a victim?

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#83

Post by lozaning »

vbezhenar wrote: post #36
seven4 wrote: post #3

I often wonder what incentives drive people to run TOR exit nodes; the risk even if remote of getting raided is enough to stop most I'd imagine. Got me thinking on the legal implications and interestingly TOR doesn't recommend running an exit node at home - Found this FAQ quite interesting https://2019.www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en Particularly ~ Has anyone ever been sued or prosecuted for running Tor?…

One reason would be to sniff cleartext traffic and extract useful info from it.

Back when I was a younger, even more naive idiot, I ran a tor exit node on a server at home and one night had the idea to mirror that switch port and run software on another machine that would display all photos from a data stream.

Its one of the more regrettable decisions I've ever made. There is no computer advice I'd give anyone that I'd more desperately implore they follow than to never ever fucking look into that abyss.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#84

Post by simonpure »

Another interesting project I've learned about recently is Snowflake [0] using WebRTC datachannels to use the browser as a proxy to help with additional entry nodes. Technical details are at [1].

I have no experience using it for any extended period of time so use at your own risk.

[0] https://snowflake.torproject.org/ [1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#85

Post by guerby »

z3j4e wrote: post #31
seven4 wrote: post #3

I often wonder what incentives drive people to run TOR exit nodes; the risk even if remote of getting raided is enough to stop most I'd imagine. Got me thinking on the legal implications and interestingly TOR doesn't recommend running an exit node at home - Found this FAQ quite interesting https://2019.www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en Particularly ~ Has anyone ever been sued or prosecuted for running Tor?…

I think that is one of the reasons why in Germany a registered association named "Zwiebelfreunde e.V." (can be translated to "Onion friends") was founded. By this it is a legal entity and legal trouble can be handled better than if its against a person but the members of the board still gets trouble with the law. Not long ago they were raided because they were treated as witnesses in a case. (Yes, in Germany even as…

In France we have at least one not-for-profit dedicated to operating Tor exit nodes:

https://nos-oignons.net/ (french) https://nos-oignons.net/%C3%80_propos/index.en.html

They host their nodes on not-for-profit ISP and friendly commercial ISP:

https://nos-oignons.net/Services/index.en.html

(0.57% exit probability)

They open or close (never happened yet) nodes based on donations:

https://nos-oignons.net/Donnez/index.en.html

Disclaimer: I'm a volunteer in one of the not-for-profit ISP hosting a nos-oignons node.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#86

Post by ufmace »

dx034 wrote: post #48
fiblye wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And probably 19 out of 20 of those despicable purposes involve buying weed edibles and shrooms.

But if the 20th is used for child pornography or human trafficking it might not matter that the other 19th just want to get high.

Maybe a weird question here. I have no doubt there's a disturbing amount of kiddie porn going over Tor. I'm sure it's served somewhere, and those who browse it have good reason to want to hide their IPs, since LE likes to seize the servers and track down everyone who viewed it by IP.

But how would Tor be used in human trafficking? I guess the people running it might email each other or something, but why bother doing that over Tor? I would guess the victims are mostly found in-person in low-income areas, probably no internet involved at all, so no point in using Tor. I would also think that if we're talking sex trafficking, the customers are also more of a street corner or in person deal than over the net. Even if the customers are finding it over the net, I haven't heard of anyone seizing whole servers for it and tracing them by IP. Am I missing something here? I just don't see it.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#87

Post by pamperson »

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.

Real strange that the mob here is downvoting you - you are right, tor is used by criminals. i’d stay away from it as it has nothing to do with being “anonymous” for...”privacy”.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#88

Post by pamperson »

minimalist wrote: post #9
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.

FWIW, I have been doing all of my non-multimedia browsing over Tor for about a decade now. It provides cover traffic for people who actually need the anonymity and I feel like it is a step in the right direction to frustrate state and corporate surveillance. Some sites break, but I have observed less and less sites breaking compared to a few years ago. Also browsing is fast enough as to not be distracting, it is like…

and tell us, what kind of activity requires such anonymity?

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#89

Post by pamperson »

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…

loads of pedos and criminals love hiding via that network, and those who run it likely know it, but they defend it as “privacy” and “freedom” yet this stat shows its being used in somewhat free countries.

Re: Operating a Tor Relay

#90

Post by flatiron »

driverdan wrote: post #78
traspler wrote: post #73

I have run a relay/entry node at home for a while, just to figure out how all of this worked and with symmetrical gigabit I have bandwidth to spare. The network never promoted my node to an entry but it operated as a relay. One thing I noticed that my IP must have suddenly been in some lists. I can't prove it but on multiple forums my IP was blacklisted an I had issues accessing some services from telco providers. Ne…

Yes, this happens. Some companies blindly block any IP that's part of the Tor network even if they're just relays. Apple Discussions used to do this, I don't know if they still do. I consider it a good filter for companies I don't want to do business with.

my old company had some bad stuff come out of tor nodes, hired a company to do some analysis, they found i ran a relay at home (employee vpns to work from home from a tor node, is what they said) and thought it was suspicious. so i was called to security and given the grief. sometimes its not worth running a relay from home...
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