Hello everyone!
A bit of context. Since November 2015, I've setup a Munin server that graphs some Tor network monitoring. You can have a look here:
http://ygzf7uqcusp4ayjs.onion/tor-health/tor-health/index.html
This email is about one of those graphs which is the Exit probability in the world. The graph has it per-continent. Here is a link to a graph with the full data since the start of my monitoring:
http://ygzf7uqcusp4ayjs.onion/static/dynazoom.html?cgiurl_graph=/munin-cgi/m...
(Fun fact, the "Unknown" one is the IPpredator relay in "Liberia" ;) https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/BC630CBBB518BE7E9F4E09712AB0269E9DC7D6...
As you can see, Europe has been very dominant but lately it has grown from ~80% to 85% in the last month. While North America is going down from ~15% to 10%.
I could do the exercise of graphing the top 10 countries in Europe that we exit but I _bet_ we'll end up with mostly 3 countries, Germany, France and Netherlands. (I might do this experiment actually.)
To be honest, this is something that concerns me because this trend is going up for running Exits in Europe. Maybe it's because of attack on Exit relays in US? Maybe Snowden effect of USA == bad? Maybe hosting providers are too expensive in the North America? Maybe tor-servers/nos-oignons are too effective :)? I honestly don't know but that's not healthy in the long run. Of course having more in Africa and South America for starters would be amazing but that's another fight I feel like.
Could we think of some outreach we could do maybe a blog post about the importance of location diversity in Exits? That running relays in the US is actually OK? or maybe just the fact that people have to stop using OVH (well OVH has a data center now in Montreal so NA!) or Hetzner or Linode? Or since Europe as a lot of countries thus multiple jurisdictions it's fine to have 85%? (is it really true with EU laws?)
There. Thoughts?
Cheers! David
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 09:43:59AM -0400, David Goulet wrote:
Could we think of some outreach we could do maybe a blog post about the importance of location diversity in Exits? That running relays in the US is actually OK? or maybe just the fact that people have to stop using OVH (well OVH has a data center now in Montreal so NA!) or Hetzner or Linode? Or since Europe as a lot of countries thus multiple jurisdictions it's fine to have 85%? (is it really true with EU laws?)
One step that might be helpful would be doing research to find reasonable ISPs outside Europe who are amenable to running exit relays. With some advocacy effort, we might even find sysadmins or owners at these ISPs who want to help out, e.g. by offering things at-cost, or by donating some bandwidth, or some other contribution.
For example, it might be more effective to do a blog post about these five ISPs we found who will do matching bandwidth donations for exit relays, compared to a more generic blog post that just identifies the problem and encourages people to fix it somehow.
There's certainly a tradeoff between focusing attention on a small number of places, vs letting people find a huge variety of places, where that better diversity would lead to better resiliency and also better security for the network. But if the choice in reality is more like "focus attention on a small number of places, or make no real progress", then I would choose the former. :)
--Roger
If we want to make substantial headway outside of the anglosphere we'll likely to have to adjust the outreach messaging. Anarchist or explicitly political movements are seen as socially destabilizing and thus generate disproportionate pushback from The Man, and ergo many ISPs would rather not touch it.
These are the approaches I've had success with in SE Asia: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-teachers/2015-October/000046.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-teachers/2015-October/000075.htm https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-teachers/2015-October/000075.html
-V
On Wednesday, 29 June 2016, Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','arma@mit.edu');> wrote:
On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 09:43:59AM -0400, David Goulet wrote:
Could we think of some outreach we could do maybe a blog post about the importance of location diversity in Exits? That running relays in the US
is
actually OK? or maybe just the fact that people have to stop using OVH
(well
OVH has a data center now in Montreal so NA!) or Hetzner or Linode? Or
since
Europe as a lot of countries thus multiple jurisdictions it's fine to
have
85%? (is it really true with EU laws?)
One step that might be helpful would be doing research to find reasonable ISPs outside Europe who are amenable to running exit relays. With some advocacy effort, we might even find sysadmins or owners at these ISPs who want to help out, e.g. by offering things at-cost, or by donating some bandwidth, or some other contribution.
For example, it might be more effective to do a blog post about these five ISPs we found who will do matching bandwidth donations for exit relays, compared to a more generic blog post that just identifies the problem and encourages people to fix it somehow.
There's certainly a tradeoff between focusing attention on a small number of places, vs letting people find a huge variety of places, where that better diversity would lead to better resiliency and also better security for the network. But if the choice in reality is more like "focus attention on a small number of places, or make no real progress", then I would choose the former. :)
--Roger
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David Goulet -
Roger Dingledine -
Virgil Griffith