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Mozilla Dusts Off Old Servers, Lights Up Tor Relays
TechCurmudgeon writes According to The Register, "Mozilla has given the Tor network a capacity kick with the launch of 14 relays that will help distribute user traffic. Engineers working under the Foundation's Polaris Project inked in November pulled Mozilla's spare and decommissioned hardware out of the cupboard for dedicated use in the Tor network. It included a pair of Juniper EX4200 switches and three HP SL170zG6 (48GB ram, 2*Xeon L5640, 2*1Gbps NIC) servers, along with a dedicated existing IP transit provider (2 X 10Gbps). French Mozilla engineer Arzhel Younsi (@xionoxfr) said its network was designed to fall no lower than half of its network capacity in the event of maintenance or failure. The Polaris initiative was a effort of Mozilla, the Tor Project and the Centre for Democracy and Technology to help build more privacy controls into technology."
Ah, but it comes with a catch. These are Mozilla servers.The AX (Administrator Experience) team has made regular improvements to them every month. As of this writing, the case has been modified so that it has no front-panel status display (not even a status bar of LEDs to show temperature and system load), and the case has been modified so that the power button is operated by a foot pedal, and next week the fiber/ethernet ports will be covered over with a 2-inch thick layer of beautifully minimalistic white epoxy laboriously hand-polished to a glossy sheen.
*bites lip* Oh, keep talking nerdy to me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Short answer: Because they're there.
Long answer: What you don't seem to understand is that none of us owe any of the world's governments a goddamn thing. They govern with our sufferance. Their continued existence depends entirely on our reluctance to face the consequences of overthrowing them. They need us more than we need them. Therefore, the world's governments should remember their place while they still have one.
It should be noted that those are relays, which transit data inside the tor network, not exit nodes (which provide exit points to the general network and can be a large risk for their operator should any illegal content be accessed). Relays still help with the general obfuscation of the network as well as for hidden services, though.
Apparently, Mozilla is considering eventually deploying exit nodes as well though.
Finally, for those that will scream "child porn", it should be noted that a very, very small minority of tor traffic is actually linked to that type of content, despite what the DoJ says; the best estimates from the tor project is around 1.5%. This move by Mozilla is a good thing - amongst other things helping countless defenders of freedom in oppressed regimes speak up in safety.