My main concern, and the reason I asked about blocking specific traffic (ip's from blacklisted p2p sites), is mainly due to the problem the original poster faces with DMCA; abuse complaints and the possibility of being shutdown. No one wants to volunteer a service and then face legal issues. Who in the hell wants or needs the headache?
That being said I can see that the original poster's issue has raised much needed debate, and a few ideas that I was not personally aware of that I believe can help everyone contribute to the Tor network in a more effective and safe manner.
In my opinion if a well intentioned Tor "contributor" has no other choice but to shutdown his exit node due to legal threats and restrictions primarily based on P2P abuse, then this will be just another reason why Tor is frowned upon and people just don't want to deal with legal issues. A lot more can be done to emphasize to "do the right thing" and then somehow "shape public opinion" on the issues of the necessity of Privacy/Anonymity in light of the NSA's (and friends') abusive and unconstitutional activities and how the Tor network as another tool can effectively help keep people secure while online.
I do believe there is a benefit to Torrents as many of us can attest to, ex: fast downloads of different Linux distros; but if your use of Torrents is in fact legit then why use Tor for downloading your legal content in the first place? This doesn't pass the smell test. As I understand it downloading from a P2P site on Tor is not a smart thing to do in the first place, if you're downloading illegal content, so why do it? Doesn't make sense. People can't claim ignorance that they didn't know that Tor does not protect their identity online when using P2P sites.
But the ones who get clobbered day-in and day-out because of the ignorant few are the Tor operators who contribute ($$$) substantially for everyone's right to freedom and privacy online. I think this act alone should be respected.
+1 for restricting bandwidth
On 11/4/2013 1:41 PM, Gordon Morehouse wrote:
On Sat, 02 Nov 2013 21:58:57 +0000, Paritesh Boyeyoko parity.boy@gmail.com wrote:
On Friday 01 Nov 2013 14:39:28 Gordon Morehouse wrote:
Completely aside from the ethical and censorship-related buzzsaw you're about to run into for posting this (perennial) question, I believe some actual developers on Tor have written a paper about the problems with Bittorrent et al (and I think there's a more specific one than the Why Tor Is Slow[1] paper) but I can't currently find it. Anybody know?
https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/roadmaps/2009-03-11-performance.pdf
NB: the above paper is from 2009.
I've just had a quick scan of that paper and it makes for an interesting read. :) I'm going to go away and read it properly but a couple observations.
Here are some more links:
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9368
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~jansen/papers/throttling-sec2012.pdf
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/research-problem-adaptive-throttling-tor-cl...
Finally found em just as another user brought some of them back to my attention. :)
Best, -Gordon M. _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays