Preventing access to scientific databases
At Karlstad University, we recently got permission to operate an exit relay. One item on our "to do" list is how we should handle databases such as IEEE Xplore. Our university has several subscriptions meaning that our net block is whitelisted to have access to the databases of different publishers. Unfortunately, we cannot allow users of our exit node to access these databases as we would risk violating copyright. Possible solutions are: - Blacklist the publisher's net blocks in our relay's exit policy. - Put our relay's IP address in a non-whitelisted net block. - Do nothing and risk getting sued? How is this handled elsewhere? Cheers, Philipp
On Wed, Feb 05, 2014 at 02:39:08PM +0100, Philipp Winter wrote:
At Karlstad University, we recently got permission to operate an exit relay. One item on our "to do" list is how we should handle databases such as IEEE Xplore. Our university has several subscriptions meaning that our net block is whitelisted to have access to the databases of different publishers. Unfortunately, we cannot allow users of our exit node to access these databases as we would risk violating copyright.
Possible solutions are: - Blacklist the publisher's net blocks in our relay's exit policy. - Put our relay's IP address in a non-whitelisted net block. - Do nothing and risk getting sued?
How is this handled elsewhere?
This was the #1 issue here at Waterloo. What we eventually went with was to run the exit node on an IP address outside of our netblock. (Your option 2 above.) We'd have done option 1, except our library did not have a comprehensive list of subscribed sites for some reason. (Also, we would have had to annoyingly keep it updated.) - Ian
On 05.02.2014, at 15:25, Ian Goldberg <iang@cs.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
This was the #1 issue here at Waterloo. What we eventually went with was to run the exit node on an IP address outside of our netblock.
We also ran into this issue here at Ruhr-University Bochum and opted for the same solution as Waterloo. Cheers, Thorsten
Our exit node at BU is on a subnet that's treated as being outside the campus network, which solves this problem as well as the problem of using Tor to circumvent the campus firewall. Alternatively, back when we were inside the campus network, we forbid exiting to campus addresses in order to solve this problem for non-third-party sites (but not for third-party sites), as well as firewall circumvention problem. On Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 8:39 AM, Philipp Winter <phw@nymity.ch> wrote:
At Karlstad University, we recently got permission to operate an exit relay. One item on our "to do" list is how we should handle databases such as IEEE Xplore. Our university has several subscriptions meaning that our net block is whitelisted to have access to the databases of different publishers. Unfortunately, we cannot allow users of our exit node to access these databases as we would risk violating copyright.
Possible solutions are: - Blacklist the publisher's net blocks in our relay's exit policy. - Put our relay's IP address in a non-whitelisted net block. - Do nothing and risk getting sued?
How is this handled elsewhere?
Cheers, Philipp _______________________________________________ tor-relays-universities mailing list tor-relays-universities@lists.torproject.org
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays-universitie...
participants (4)
-
Ian Goldberg -
Leonid Reyzin -
Philipp Winter -
Thorsten Holz