When placing nodes in a family is appropriate

[Aplin, Justin M]

On 5/30/2010 9:06 PM, Scott Bennett wrote:
>       Your understanding is thoroughly mistaken.
>    

 From the documentation:
"When two servers both declare that they are in the same 'family', Tor 
clients will not use them in the same circuit."
Mistaken, perhaps, but it should certainly be easy to see where I got my 
idea from. Declaring a family essentially separates servers from 
concurrent usage; my point was that two trusted nodes, owned by the same 
person, on separate networks, will act exactly the same as two nodes 
owned by different people if there is no MyFamily option set. Flamsmark 
excellently answered the question in his reply:

> If two nodes are run by the same person or organization they should be 
> in the same family. If someone controls two (or more) nodes, they can 
> connect the dots, reducing Tor to a 2-hop, or 1-hop proxy. Even if 
> they are trustworthy, this makes them open to coercion. Any nodes 
> under the control of the same person should be in the same family. 

Which shows the security implications of not grouping servers into 
families based on ownership, and is, I think, the important point to 
come away with.

>       Please read the entry for "MyFamily" in the man page.  Documentation
> shipped with tor is actually quite good and is provided for a reason.
>    

While I appreciate the "RTFM" mindset, assuming I have not done so both 
completely misses the point of the question I was asking, and is just a 
tad rude. Perhaps the lesson here is that the documentation, while good, 
could go a bit further in explaining *how* this option helps the 
network, instead of just *what* it does?

~japlin