Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.