Hello,
I run a 100mb exit hosted at server.lu since sometime in late 2013. There have been a couple dozen abuse reports but normally they forward them to me to deal with and nothing much happens. However a week or so ago, while I was travelling, there was an abuse report that made them decide to file a ticket which then led to them suspending my IP as I 'ignored' it while I was gone. So now I'm trying to convince them to turn the system back on and they are pushing back, and after some back and forth they say they want me to run an exit policy consisting of ports 53, 80, and 443. I've been running the suggested reduced exit policy since day one and am very reluctant to pare it down further, and certainly not to just 3 ports. I wrote a short note explaining my point of view and I wonder if any of you would do me the courtesy of telling me if I am likely to convince them to let me leave the exit policy alone. I'm very willing to edit my response as required. I think it bears mentioning that I am several messages in and I did not get a good sense that whoever I am talking to understands Tor very well at all - I was repeatedly asked to find and block my customer, and told I must have logs if I provide a service, etc. I can show you the longer exchange if you think it might be helpful. Thanks in advance and here goes:
--- Hello,
We have nothing against Tor but IP is listed at 11 blacklists including Spamhaus ZEN. So we have to ask you block all ports except 80, 53 and 443 to prevent scan, spam and other infringing activity from your IP. Hope such proposal will be suitable for you.
Regards, ROOT S.A.
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Hello again,
I would rather not block any more ports that are already blocked. The system is already set up to use the reduced exit policy detailed at https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReducedExitPolicy which allows as many Internet services as possible while still blocking the majority of TCP ports. Currently, the policy allows approximately 65 ports. I am reluctant to further reduce the ports because there is vastly more to the internet than just the world wide web. Email, chat, remote desktop, cache, and vpn services are all valid uses of the network that would not be allowed by such a restrictive exit policy. I'm also afraid that it will not help much in getting this IP off the various blocklists that it is on, as 2/3rds of the abuse reports I've been sent were due to traffic on ports 80 or 443. Several of the lists such as SECTOOR and Dans TOREXIT and related are simply reporting to the world that this system is a Tor node. The system is only in the Spamhaus Zen list due to its listing in the CBL for being "infected with, or is NATting for a machine infected with s_vawtrak" which is a Microsoft Windows virus that connected to their sinkhole IP on port 80. Being on blocklists is something that happens when you are running a Tor exit node and supporting Tor means putting up with them and explaining why Tor is worth supporting even though abuse is guaranteed to happen.
Naturally if you require this change I will be forced to make it. I hope, however, that you can be persuaded that it is not helpful to Tor and will not solve the problem of abuse and blacklists even if it were. Thanks again.
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Thanks for getting this far. I await your replies with interest. :)