Thus spake George Gemelos (gmg@gemelos.com):
On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 05:22:13PM +0000, George Gemelos wrote:
Is there a further reduced set that might be better, in the sense of avoiding complaints, and still remain useful as an exit node?
You could get your toes wet by "accept *:80, accept *:443, reject *:*". That would let people browse the web through you, which is very useful, while somewhat reducing the variety of abuse complaints you might get.
Then if it goes well for a while, you could open up a few more ports.
Also, if later your ISP decides that it's getting too much mail and asks you to quit it, you can tell them about the time you allowed only web browsing and they didn't mind -- then you have something to fall back to that isn't just being a non-exit.
I was actually thinking of just allowing 80 and 443. My only concern was that I was not sure how useful an exit node with just 80 and 443 would be.
For the current consensus, according to the extra-info documents parsed by: https://gitweb.torproject.org/torflow.git/blob_plain/HEAD:/NetworkScanners/s... nodes running the default policy have a port bytecount breakdown like:
Default exit blutmagie4 read 604.3M 80: 68.6% other: 25.8% 443: 3.1% 51413: 0.6% 55315: 0.5% 59776: 0.3% Default exit blutmagie4 wrote 96.2M other: 81.4% 80: 12.1% 443: 3.4% 51413: 1.5% 44596: 1.4% 4000: 0.1%
Default exit rainbowwarrior read 736.8M other: 70.2% 80: 24.6% 443: 1.1% 51413: 1.1% 6881: 1.0% 35691: 0.5% Default exit rainbowwarrior wrote 277.0M other: 92.1% 51413: 1.9% 80: 1.8% 6881: 1.4% 33526: 1.0% 4662: 1.0%
Default exit politkovskaja read 520.5M other: 72.6% 80: 23.6% 443: 1.0% 51413: 0.9% 6881: 0.7% 54909: 0.4% Default exit politkovskaja wrote 192.4M other: 92.0% 4662: 1.7% 80: 1.6% 6881: 1.4% 51413: 1.3% 6995: 0.6%
Where as nodes running the reduced exit policy have a port bytecount breakdown like:
Misc Exit raidz read 327.3M 80: 92.0% 443: 4.6% 8333: 1.4% 8080: 0.7% 563: 0.4% 81: 0.4% Misc Exit raidz wrote 11.6M 80: 65.4% 443: 21.5% 8333: 10.5% other: 2.3% 8080: 0.2% 563: 0.1%
Misc Exit zeller read 315.4M 80: 94.6% 443: 4.4% 8080: 0.3% 81: 0.2% 8000: 0.2% other: 0.1% Misc Exit zeller wrote 11.2M 80: 71.6% 443: 22.4% 21: 4.5% other: 0.9% 8000: 0.3% 8333: 0.2%
Misc Exit Amunet2 read 182.1M 80: 93.4% 443: 5.4% 8080: 0.6% other: 0.2% 81: 0.2% 995: 0.1% Misc Exit Amunet2 wrote 6.3M 80: 71.6% 443: 26.5% other: 1.1% 22: 0.6% 8080: 0.1% 995: 0.0%
So if you've already committed to the reduced exit policy, 95%+ of the traffic will be 80+443.
P.S. Odd that the blutmagie nodes all appear to be reading quite a lot of port 80 data when compared to other default exits. Perhaps some scrapers have hardcoded them as their favorite exits?