On Thu, Jun 05, 2014 at 09:43:42PM +0100, Iain R. Learmonth wrote:
Are there any possibilities that running a relay would get an IP address blacklisted anywhere? Do exit and non-exit relays get treated the same by those that block Tor?
There do exist services on the Internet that just scoop up all the Tor relay IP addresses -- or worse, "some dude's list of what he thinks might be Tor relay IP addresses" -- and treat them all the same without ever stopping to learn what an exit policy is. Some of them take this approach because they're inept, and I imagine others do it to punish everything related to Tor in hopes that it'll all just go away. See also the end of https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse#Bans If you have a spare unused IP address, you'll be happiest using it here.
Once you're making progress, you can tell them "and later we can talk about making it an exit relay".
We're an Internet engineering research group, so I imagine a research reason is going to come up for an exit relay eventually (if it hasn't already - we are looking into the list of open research questions).
Do you run a Planetlab node? If so, you might consider "I used Tor in my research, and now I'm giving back. Just because the Tor people are nice enough to not blackmail me into participating before I can use their system doesn't reduce my obligation to help make sure this system that I rely on continues to exist." But I admit that's more roundabout than "I am studying what the Internet does to me when I run an exit relay, so of course I need one". --Roger