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Tor Project Experiments With Funding Fast Exit Nodes
mask.of.sanity writes "The Tor Project is considering paying exit relay hosts to make the network faster and more secure. The project has called for discussion on the idea, notably from relay hosts. Its founder has suggested $100 a month would attract fast and diverse nodes. Exit nodes are the last hopping point on the Tor network and are critical to its performance and safety."
The problem: "But lately the Tor network has become noticeably faster, and I think it has a lot to do with the growing amount of excess relay capacity relative to network load ... on today's network, clients choose one of the fastest 5 exit
relays around 25-30% of the time, and 80% of their choices come from a
pool of 40-50 relays. ... Since we're
not doing particularly well at diversity with the current approach,
we're going to try an experiment: we'll connect funding to exit relay
operators so they can run bigger and/or better exit relays." As to funding: "We've lined up our first funder (BBG, ...), and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can. They want to sponsor 125+ fast exits."
I always want to be able to make a fast exit from whereever I am.
I mean, even if you are paid much more than $100 a month, being legally and financially responsible for the shit that goes on through your server (since you are the EXIT node) could get you sent to jail for life and cost you huge amounts of money. Sounds completely insane for anyone to willingly run such a thing.
It's a public service, helping to preserve people's ability to practice their right to free speech. Plenty of us believe extremely strongly in that, and I'd consider it at least as worthy as many other philanthropic causes. If I had a decent amount of money (i.e. enough to consult a lawyer beforehand, take reasonable legal precautions, and kick up a stink rather than just disappearing if I ever were taken to court) I'd do it like a shot.
From wiki:
"The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan panel of eight private citizens appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate (the U.S. Secretary of State is an ex officio member of the Board), is the oversight body for official U.S. international broadcasts by both federal agencies and government-funded corporations. In addition to VOA, these include the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB, which includes Radio and TV Marti) and grantee corporations: the Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN, which includes Radio Sawa and Al Hurra television in Arabic); Radio Farda (in Persian) for Iran; Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, which are aimed at the ex-communist states and countries under oppressive regimes in Asia. In recent years, VOA has expanded its television coverage to many areas of the world. This governing body was established in 1993 to replace the Board for International Broadcasters, which was created in 1973 to manage broadcasting companies previously funded by the CIA."
More from Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/2012/07/tor-exits-usg-funds.htm
This new version also features 2-3 times more harassment from the government.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It would be nice to think that everyone would all do it, making it basically impossible to harass individual exit nodes. That's certainly the theory behind Tor. And it's a noble idea.
But then again, let's face it, most people are leechers. And unless you could find a way to encourage mass adoption of Tor, combined with a default (perhaps even mandatory) setting of "allow exit node", it's probably not going to work.
Maybe they could bundle it in with some really popular apps or games. Offer "This game $10 for the regular version/free with Tor" specials.
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
It's great for FBI,CIA,MI5 etc. It concentrates a lot of questionable traffic to very few nodes and make anyone connecting to these nodes immediately suspicious. Running a node for money would make it a more serious offense in court which is great for the DA: winning more years in prison means a better career for the DA.
Sounds completely insane for anyone to willingly run such a thing.
Some people are brave enough to run servers that will help political dissidents in China, Africa, and elsewhere.
Palm trees and 8
It would be nice to think that everyone would all do it, making it basically impossible to harass individual exit nodes
Like how it is impossible to harass individual pot smokers? Even if there were millions of exit nodes, the police would be harassing exit node operators, just to keep everyone afraid.
Palm trees and 8
This new version also features 2-3 times more harassment from the government.
Or maybe the government will be providing the exit nodes (via proxy companies). I am sure that the ability to add delays at exit would aid traffic identification
Do not pass go. Collect $100.
It is brave if you live in a country where the police will harass you over your exit node:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/why-ip-addresses-alone-dont-identify-criminals
Palm trees and 8
But then again, let's face it, most people are leechers.
I have a reasonably fast business ADSL connection which is genuinely unmetered with no "fair-usage", no throttling, no DPI. It is literally a packet-shifting Internet connection through my ISP which is fairly rare in the UK these days!
I'd love to open it up to the benefit of society, but I just can't accept the risks of running something like a Tor node. Even running a secondary channel with open wifi makes me nervous.
I suppose this makes me cowardly.... and means they are winning.
Tor has been out for ten years. Could you post some links to articles where people were held legally and/or financially responsible for what passed through their exit node?
Pornography and copying files are not universally illegal either. For the purposes of a high school student, the school's rules basically are the law; circumventing a school firewall to read hackaday is only differentiated from a Saudi Arabian citizen accessing Naughty Nurses 2 by the punishment that offender can receive.
The two goals of Tor are censorship busting and privacy enhancement; why focus on controversial things, when there are so many non-controversial things that people are unable to access?
Palm trees and 8
OK, sure, but there are a large number of child molester forums that are not hidden services (e.g. the recent "dreamboard" bust), and some people want to access those. It would be great for Tor if the pedophiles would just use hidden services and not put the exit node operators at risk, but that is an unrealistic expectation. Hidden services have always been a somewhat secondary feature for Tor; the primary reason people use Tor is to browse the (not-hidden) web.
Palm trees and 8
Most connections from exit nodes are perfectly legal. For example a Chinese guy wants to access Slashdot. The traffic in the US is legal and it's just his traffic which is encrypted and going to a different node which is where he has a problem if it's discovered.
Let's be clear. The mere fact that you aren't doing anything doesn't make you immune from the police. There are so many laws and regulations set up for corporate interests that it's likely that you are breaking something; merely not running an exit node will not protect you. Filtering the traffic on exit nodes can very much reduce anti-social (potentially illegal) traffic. As long as you are only accepting a partial contribution and your costs are more than $100 you can treat this as an expense payment rather than a profit. This is likely to be seen very differently in court than profiting from an activity. Furthermore, the explicit involvement with the Tor project could help make it clear you did things for political reasons rather than in order to facilitate illegal activities. Overall, bearing in mind INAL, INAL in your country and, ICNYL (certainly not your lawyer), I don't see that this much increases the risk of a person running an exit node.
There's plenty of reasonable FUD to spread about tor; it could be very risky to use tor from China since the traffic isn't that well hidden; you have to be very careful about your end point security; in less-democratic / less free countries you may be arrested for running an exit node even if you had no intention of supporting illegal activities. There's no need to make up extra FUD
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
[anecdote]
I had legal troubles* as someone used my exit node for downloading child pornography. after nearly 2 years the prosecutor closed the proceedings as he found nothing punishable.
*) including some officers searching my flat at 7 am and all my hardware was confiscated
Hi, I help run an exit node. Specifically NoiseTor - http://noisetor.net/ Yes, we do get police/FBI/etc calls regularly. Most of the time it takes a few min of explaining what tor is, we have no logs, and there's nothing we can do to help track down where the traffic came from.
It's invaluable to run exit nodes, and the risks are fairly minor.
Buy a server using an anonymous payment method, run the exit node on it, pay no more than monthly in case it gets taken down (ISP is uncomfortable, etc.), accept donations using an anonymous payment method. You can spend the received money anonymously, or otherwise carefully clean them before accessing with your personal identity.
I do something like this for I2P and Freenet and never tried running a TOR exit node this way, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.
How is it that they let you get away with just saying that? Then what stops me from distributing terrorist child porn warez from my home PC and then saying it was a Tor exit node when they call? In fact, they probably would never call me. They would contact my ISP, which would cut me off and tell them my home address and all information about me and then the police would come straight to my house without any warning. Why are they so kind to you?