- tor-relays - lists.torproject.org

Question regarding ethical torrent blocking
by Conrad Rockenhaus 20 Jul '18

20 Jul '18

Hello, I was going to ask someone off-list, but the amount of abuse and DCMA complaints I have received now have been so much that I have decided that the best action to take is to set an exit policy. I run a couple of exit nodes and I have people apparently using them to torrent, which we ask people politely not to do through Tor....but the policy gets ignored I guess. Anyway, I'm receiving a sufficient amount of complaints to where I'm worried that my service may be terminated unless I take action, which would affect the greater good. So the question is - I run the default exit policy. I don't like being the arbiter of what goes through and what doesn't. Is it okay, ethically, from a free speech standpoint, to reach this point to where we say "we need to block this content from transversing my node" in response to legal complaints from others? Are others implementing these blocks and do you feel that such a block doesn't violate any ethical norm to provide uncensored access to the Internet? I'm just curious on what thoughts on this are. I know how to technically perform the block, I guess I feel like we're one of the last bastions against censorship on the Internet and people do torrent legitimate stuff. I don't consider pirating Fallout 4, The Elder Scrolls V, Sweetbitter, and The Evil Within 2 to be protected speech FYI... my worry is just blocking the legitimate uses of bittorrent. Thanks, Conrad Rockenhaus

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Discounts/Free Trials on BSD instances to promote BSD relays?
by Conrad Rockenhaus 20 Jul '18

20 Jul '18

Howdy, So, anyway, I was previously more active, but I decided on a midlife career change and was on a training path to become a Physician Assistant. Then I was hit by a drunk driver. Now I had to drop out of the program for the next year at least, if at all, so I'm going back to working IT. That's the sob story. I like BSD, primarily FreeBSD (please flame me about how my relays aren't secure later :P) and like promoting the use of it. I have excess capacity on dedicated servers that I personally pay for that are used to host portions of a very popular Wiki based Satire/Dark Humor website. Some of that capacity is already going to Tor. On the servers that have address space SWIPed to me, I would like to resell that capacity specifically to host BSD based Tor relays, exits, bridges, and hidden services. Right now I'm working on infrastructure and a website and trying to somewhat automate things. The question I would like to ask, and honestly, I'm not trying to generate customers, I honestly believe that if a Linux user actually logs into a BSD box for the first time and sees the beauty and grace that the differences between BSD and Linux are that they would want to switch their own personal relay. I'm a firm believer of this. I know there's some hardcore Linux fans out there and that's fine, there's a legion of BSD fans too :). To the point - would it be fair to network stability to offer a week long free trial to run a tor instance, well, that is if that's what the user hopefully runs? Would such a model even have an affect on increasing the number of BSD instances we have on Tor presently? And again, per a suggestion in a previous email chain that I was involved in, I setup my ARIN and RIPE ids, and my providers have SWIPed the address spaces to me so any and all abuse complaints will be coming to me for the address spaces for now on. Thanks, Conrad

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Updating relay using killall -hup command
by Keifer Bly 20 Jul '18

20 Jul '18

Hello, So recently I upgraded from tor 0.3.3.8 to tor 0.3.3.9, and used the killall -HUP command to restart the relay. However this did nothing, the relay consensus says I am still running tor 0.3.3.8 days later. Is there a way I can cause the upgrade to appear without completely restarting the relay? The OS is macos High Sierra 10.13.6. Thank you.

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Re: [tor-relays] Discounts/Free Trials on BSD instances to promote BSD relays?
by Conrad Rockenhaus 19 Jul '18

19 Jul '18

Thank you for letting me know, I will look into this! I greatly appreciate the tip. On Wed, Jul 18, 2018 at 9:03 PM, Alejandro Andreu <contact(a)alejandroandr.eu> wrote: > Hi, > > For automating the setup please consider using `gibson`[1], an effort made > by the folks at Emerald Onion to better manage a Tor relay through a set of > shell scripts. It's still in development, but just as you do, they run > everything in BSD boxes. > > Cheers! > > [1]: https://emeraldonion.org/introducing-gibson/ > > > > -------- Original Message -------- > > On Jul 19, 2018, 09:34, Conrad Rockenhaus < conrad(a)rockenhaus.com> wrote: > > > Howdy, > > So, anyway, I was previously more active, but I decided on a midlife > career change and was on a training path to become a Physician > Assistant. Then I was hit by a drunk driver. Now I had to drop out of > the program for the next year at least, if at all, so I'm going back > to working IT. That's the sob story. > > I like BSD, primarily FreeBSD (please flame me about how my relays > aren't secure later :P) and like promoting the use of it. I have > excess capacity on dedicated servers that I personally pay for that > are used to host portions of a very popular Wiki based Satire/Dark > Humor website. Some of that capacity is already going to Tor. On the > servers that have address space SWIPed to me, I would like to resell > that capacity specifically to host BSD based Tor relays, exits, > bridges, and hidden services. Right now I'm working on infrastructure > and a website and trying to somewhat automate things. > > The question I would like to ask, and honestly, I'm not trying to > generate customers, I honestly believe that if a Linux user actually > logs into a BSD box for the first time and sees the beauty and grace > that the differences between BSD and Linux are that they would want to > switch their own personal relay. I'm a firm believer of this. I know > there's some hardcore Linux fans out there and that's fine, there's a > legion of BSD fans too :). > > To the point - would it be fair to network stability to offer a week > long free trial to run a tor instance, well, that is if that's what > the user hopefully runs? Would such a model even have an affect on > increasing the number of BSD instances we have on Tor presently? > > And again, per a suggestion in a previous email chain that I was > involved in, I setup my ARIN and RIPE ids, and my providers have > SWIPed the address spaces to me so any and all abuse complaints will > be coming to me for the address spaces for now on. > > Thanks, > > Conrad > _______________________________________________ > tor-relays mailing list > tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays -- Conrad Rockenhaus Get started with GreyPony Anonymization Today! https://www.greyponyit.com

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Home router keeps failing.
by Gary 17 Jul '18

17 Jul '18

Hi, I keep having issues with my home router - it keeps failing due to the number of connections and I would be grateful for some advice. I have been running a (non-exit) middle relay for some time and up until now my router has mostly coped. It is what is what I got from my ISP, I can't afford to get a new one. At the minute I had to reset it on a daily basis which not only breaks tor circuits, but I am finding it increasingly hard to convince other people I live with that we need the relay when it causes them browsing issues. My relay connects via wire Ethernet. When I get to (approx) 900 incoming / 600 outgoing tor connections the router goes TITSUP. ACCOUNTING MAX is set to 8GBytes, I think the actual daily usage is about 4 GB though. RelayBandwidthRate is 250 KBytes, RelayBandwitdthBurst is 500KBytes. Although there are a few other devices / phones also connected, however I would estimate not more than a combined 2 GB daily HTTP / HTTPS traffic for all devices. No file sharing / P2P other than tor. My DSL speed is approx 50 mbits download / 15 mbits upload I dont want to keep resetting my router every day, I would be grateful for any advice. Many Thanks.

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Re: [tor-relays] Question regarding ethical torrent blocking
by tor＠t-3.net 16 Jul '18

16 Jul '18

grarpamp <grarpamp(a)gmail.com> wrote: > If operators are taking flak from their upstream, > and they want to carry the traffic for reasons, > before giving in and deploying exit policy, see what options > are available to SWIP the address space to you and thus > eat a lot of the complaints from the internet yourself. What he said, but adding to this - There are not many exit operators who will be in a position to actually own their own IP space and therefore have it SWIPed to them 100%, with nobody else getting abuse complaints. The more SWIP you can get pointed at you, the better, but unfortunately something like getting colo space and a /28 doesn't necessarily get you that. The automated DCMA complaints are actually an abuse of the recipient's email system because the goons sending them do not change what they are doing (or in fact, respond) when you ask them to stop emailing you. For those in a position to run exit policies that might result in abusive automated DCMA emails, it is entirely within the realm of reasonable to build email server filters to reject those at the SMTP envelope (refusal to even accept the emails). You'll also probably be making a filter that outright rejects Base-64 emails from that sender (ie: requiring all abuse@ emails to be submitted plain text or HTML).

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Re: [tor-relays] Fwd: Tor Guard Relay
by Mirimir 14 Jul '18

14 Jul '18

On 06/09/2018 01:51 PM, Keifer Bly wrote: > I just scanned the picture files using Avast, which I use a a lot and it is > a pretty great anti virus program based off of my use with it. Here is the > contents of the email in programming code; I don't know about other email > services but in Gmail this can be retrieved by signing into the web version > (in a web browser) clicking the more options button (next to the replay > button) and clicking "show original". > >>From what I can tell looking at the code, it is encoded using base64 and > the ip address of the web server it was sent from is 104.161.37.109. > > However, as for telling anything else, it seems like that would be > difficult to do without the right equipment. Let me know what you think. Thanks for source with headers. I don't see anything useful, though, I do see that "In-Reply-To: <5b182b2c.1c69fb81.390f6.f0ea(a)mx.google.com>" is correct, so the sender is probably subscribed to the list. Getting that right from messages in the online archives would be nontrivial. But damn: "I joined this site so that i could weed through the guys who aren’t serious and reliable enough to invite to my house where i feel comfortable." Trolling the tor-relays list for nice guys to date? That is bizarre. > On Sat, Jun 9, 2018 at 5:26 PM Mirimir <mirimir(a)riseup.net> wrote: > >> On 06/09/2018 05:28 AM, Keifer Bly wrote: >>> I was asked by mirmir to send one of the emails as a txt file, and so >> here >>> it is. It is at the google drive link below, I had tried to send it as an >>> attachment, but got a note back saying it was being held because it was >> too >>> big. The zip file contains the contents of the email and the attached >>> images. Thank you. I will try creating a spam filter for the email domain >>> they are coming from, though a few of them have come from yahoo.com >> domain, >>> which annoyingly I can't really block as some of my legitimate contacts >> use >>> yahoo mail. I could try reporting this to Google, what do you think? >>> >>> >> https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_cH2cPZZmbTMmE2Ni1hc1BZbXliM0hMaTZnN19Gc… >> >> Thanks. But the text there doesn't contain headers. But that's less an >> issue, because from headers aren't spoofed. The question now is whether >> this is simple trolling, or attempts to infiltrate machines of relay >> operators. Someone experienced with malware analysis could examine the >> images for attack code, as Roman suggested. But that's over my head. >> >> Blocking *.mexyst.com domains, as Neel suggested, will likely stop most >> of them, with little or no downside. But blocking yahoo.com isn't >> workable for many. But if they're all as salacious as Keifer's example, >> blocking on language seems workable. Or language plus domain. >> >> As with Efail, this is a reminder of the risks of decoding HTML, loading >> embedded images, and fetching remote content. And the importance of >> compartmentalizing email and browsing from credentials for relay >> management (and other high-impact stuff, such as finances). >> >>> On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 9:57 PM Mirimir <mirimir(a)riseup.net> wrote: >>> >>>> On 06/08/2018 05:03 PM, Keifer Bly wrote: >>>>> This is one of the about 20 emails that have been received. Upon >> looking >>>> it >>>>> looks like they are spoofing the [tor-relays] subject line. My >> apologies >>>>> for the subject change but could not find a way to forward the emails >>>>> without forwarding them from an old conversation. Thank you. (The >> subject >>>>> this is in reference to is "Spam Emails Received From This Mailing >>>> List"). >>>> >>>> OK, so they're just using subject lines from the list. And not spoofing >>>> the from address. >>>> >>>> But what you forwarded doesn't include the headers. By googling, I get >>>> this: >>>> >>>> | 1) Open the message in your Gmail inbox. >>>> | 2) Click the down-arrow in the top-right corner of the message. >>>> | 3) Click the "Show original" link toward the bottom of the options >>>> | box. The message will open in a separate window with the full >>>> | message headers at the top. >>>> >>>> Just save that as a text file, and send it to me as an attachment. >>>> >>>> Why the bloody hell someone would target users of this list in that way >>>> is bizarre. And why you? Rather than me, who is admittedly an outspoken >>>> jerk sometimes ;) >>>> >>>>> ---------- Forwarded message --------- >>>>> From: Becky Janet <beckyjanet335900(a)re.mexyst.com> >>>>> Date: Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 7:48 PM >>>>> Subject: Re: [tor-relays] Tor Guard Relay >>>>> To: Keifer Bly <keifer.bly(a)gmail.com> >>>>> >>>>> >>>>> first you need to trust someone to find real sex partner. So if you >> want >>>> to >>>>> find real sex partner then you need to trust me. Always i'm telling you >>>>> it's totally f r e e. Just connect with My Private Page >>>>> <http://datingflirt.info/1stold> by submitting you mail, name, age >> etc. >>>> I'm >>>>> assure you if it's ask any cc then no need to connect with me. So just >>>>> trust and try. Trust Me & Try It Now NCTB ; After completing this task >>>>> check your mail ,Automatically you will get my personal phone no in >> your >>>>> mail within 5 min. Just check your mail (inbox/s p a m) and call me >> asap. >>>>> I'm waiting for your cam >>>>> >>>> _______________________________________________ >>>> tor-relays mailing list >>>> tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org >>>> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays >>>> >>> >> _______________________________________________ >> tor-relays mailing list >> tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org >> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays >> >

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bridge not accessible through obfs4 port
by entensaison＠use.startmail.com 13 Jul '18

13 Jul '18

Dear friends, I am uncuccessfully running a bridge that uses obfs4 as pluggable transport. (At least it should.) Today I actually tried to connect to it and it is possible to connect to the bridge using the ORport. But when I tried to start tor browser with this setting to use obfs4: obfs4 12.345.67.89:1111 (only with the right numbers) it got stuck at "establishing an encrypted network connection". I checked on canyouseeme.org and both the vanilla ORport and the obfs4 port seem to be accessible from outside. My router is set to allow TCP and UDP on the port for obfs4. What could be causing the problem? Cheers, Lo Am Mittwoch, 11. Juli 2018 um 20:47 schrieb Keifer Bly <keifer.bly(a)gmail.com>: > > In comparison how much bandwidth would a Tor bridge user per month? > > It would be tough to give an exact answer to that is it depends on > how many people are connecting through your specific bridge. However > in general the bandwidth requirements would be much less, as bridges > are used for mostly areas where the tor network is blocked whereas > one of the exit relays is used by every client that uses tor at all. > > You can find more information on this topic here > > >> https://metrics.torproject.org/stats.html > > This page contains information about how much traffic different types > of relays generally send and receive over time, etc. > > PS, my apologies if this comes through twice for some reason. My > email client is acting a bit strange at the moment. > > On Wed, Jul 11, 2018 at 9:04 AM Nathaniel Suchy <me(a)lunorian.is> > wrote: >> Hi. I would like to run a public OBFS4 Tor Bridge. Digitalocean’s >> price changes made running an exit too expensive. In comparison how >> much bandwidth would a Tor bridge use per month? >> >> Cheers, >> Nathaniel >> _______________________________________________ >> tor-relays mailing list >> tor-relays(a)lists.torproject.org >> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

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Relay Search feature request: add consensus weight line/graph
by nusenu 12 Jul '18

12 Jul '18

I filed a RS feature request that should help you better understand / interpret relay trending (relay doing better or worse?) https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26767 Relay Search has two graphs showing bw history data and relative values (fraction and probabilities): consensus weight fraction middle probability guard probability exit probability written bytes per second read bytes per second One of the most relevant question for a relay operator is: How is my relay doing? Is it doing better or worse than usually? A good data point to answer this is to look at the cw value over time (not cw fraction) since the probabilities and fraction values are relative and not directly controllable by the operator (i.e. other operators add relays). This will allow relay operators to answer questions like: "My cw fraction decreased, was it because my cw decreased or did my cw remain stable and someone else added more resources?" a graph showing the ratio between cw fraction to cw would also be nice since it answers above question more directly without having to compare the cw and cw fraction lines manually onionoo data: https://metrics.torproject.org/onionoo.html#weights_relay_consensus_weight the onion box displays a cw graph: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ralphwetzel/theonionbox/master/docs/images/weights.png

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Bridge bandwidth usage?
by Nathaniel Suchy 11 Jul '18

11 Jul '18

Hi. I would like to run a public OBFS4 Tor Bridge. Digitalocean’s price changes made running an exit too expensive. In comparison how much bandwidth would a Tor bridge use per month? Cheers, Nathaniel

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