Hi Eran,
a developer offering to help relay operators what better can we ask for :)
Eran Sandler:
Being a software developer by trade I've been thinking about projects and services that might help Tor Relay Operators and Tor in general and have a few ideas I wanted to pass along and see if anyone sticks.
A few of the most notable ones are:
- *Tor Weather Replacement* - ever since Tor Weather went down I've
found that I actually miss it. It doesn't happen often that my relays are down but it does happen from time to time and in the past Tor Weather really helped get notified.
yes, this is on the radar of the relay advocate - Colin and maybe also the Tor Metrics team to some extend - and they are certainly happy if someone takes this on - especially if you are also considering to maintain this on the long term (the last service has been discontinued to to missing maintainership)
you can find more about this on trac and the previous thread: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2018-May/015238.html https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/26124
- *System to provide tor exit node verification*. Given a pre-registered
app and callback and a fingerprint of a node it will find the Email of the operator and email a unique link. When that link is clicked a callback will be made to the preregistered URL - allowing a developer to verify that a certain node operator is truely the one accessing the service. That is actually needed for both of the services mentioned above.
This yet another good point and I had that (verified contactInfo) specifically in mind when starting the ContactInfo specification:
https://github.com/nusenu/ContactInfo-Information-Sharing-Specification: "provide the foundation for an automated contactInfo verification bot."
So if you are going to implement something like that I would be happy to work with you.
- *Simple package to run a webserver + customized tor exit node notice
page* - similar to what I configured for http://tor4thepeople1.torexitnode.net. It's very useful and if we can get a super basic web server that only serves this page and would be easy to install (maybe even bundle with Tor) + let's encrypt integration (to serve it under SSL) it would provide great benefit to all operators.
Since this functionality can be done with tor alone (DirPortFrontPage) and additional software (webserver) increases the attack surface I'm more leaning towards not recommending every relay operator to run also a webserver.
looking forward to how this progresses! :)
thanks, nusenu