Kevin C. Krinke:
On Nov 4, 2013, at 7:13 PM, Nelson nelson@net2wireless.net wrote:
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.
What about someone in a highly censored locale that wants to download a copy of Tails or TBB without "them" knowing?
+1 for restricting bandwidth
For the record, my exit node does limit the ports as per the reduced exit policy [1] and I'd happily open it up wide if I could throttle just the torrenting to a minimally-usable level. However, I honestly don't think it's realistic to spend so much effort to solve the throttling of torrents when those efforts could be better spent elsewhere [2].
One could have a wide-open exit policy and then do adaptive throttling of all the ports not on the ReducedExitPolicy, without censoring traffic. This can be accomplished entirely with tools that are outside of Tor, e.g. iptables.
Also, educating any of the bigger BitTorrent software providers (uTorrent, Transmission, librtorrent, the knuckledraggers from Vuze probably being a lost cause) to add a *configurable option* to look up peer IPs in a Tor DNSBL and refuse to communicate them would reduce, uh, supply I guess it would be. That's something that can also be done pretty independently of Tor core development - i.e. somebody else can spend the time to do it.
Best, - -Gordon M.