On 2021-07-28 06:02, hackerncoder wrote:
It also occurs to me that if I were building something new today, some mechanism for tor nodes themselves to proxy http and https requests from the public internet would be relatively straightforward to implement, creating a wide network of sources for the files without requiring individual mirror operators, without replication, without disk space consumption, etc. But again, probably more trouble than it would actually be worth at this point.
Isn't that just... kinda Tor?
It would be a bootstrapping mechanism, using Tor's strengths to help people who don't (yet) have access to Tor get started with plain http and/or https.
Or a 1 hop through an exit node. It sounds good, but if we are talking censorship, that won't work.
No more or less than a public list of mirrors. And admittedly whether mirrors have any ongoing value or not is a part of this topic in general.
Some particularly dumb filters (literally everything DNS based, which is all the rage) may block torproject.org specifically but not be designed to block widely). And of course DNS filters can't block any direct-to-IP URL.
A Twitter bot or other mechanism could provide users with a URL as needed, or any other existing mechanism that provides mirrors today.
And it doesn't sound like CDN or in any way taking load of the tpo.org servers?
If load on the torproject.org infrastructure is a factor then the tor nodes could cache, although that was more than I was initially thinking. My guess is that only a handful of files are being actively used at any particular moment. But this would require some sort of configuration knobs to allow server operators to configure how much disk space and/or memory they're willing to allocate, and if local caching was required then this would need to be disabled by default.
I don't believe the main download site has capacity problems, although I genuinely have no idea. If this was a significant factor, then tor nodes might even contact other tor nodes to pull from their cache rather than pulling it from somewhere central. But we're approaching recreating IPFS at this point, and frankly, doesn't seem like a problem that needs to be solved.
If torproject.org load is a concern, having tor nodes cache updates for torbrowser's autoupdate mechanism would probably be beneficial too.
So I don't see what it is supposed to do.
Zero-effort dynamic mirrors that are always up to date, widely distributed, consuming no resources except when utilized.
Sure, tor node IPs are not secret and but neither are mirror URLs today.
To be clear, I'm not sure that this is actually useful in today's internet, I'm more thinking about what I would build today if there wasn't already a pool of mirrors and wanted to develop something new.