Heya,
Great post, and looking at the tor metrics graph, it seems exit relay bandwidth has been stable, perhaps extremely slowly rising over the past 365 days. So we have less relays but the same bandwidth, which is good for the consensus but bad for anonymity. I think people who don't run exit nodes but run relays (like this mailing list) don't do Exits for 2 main reasons: #1: Abuse, legal, time etc. concerns, which is what most news articles talk about, like yourself. And #2: Cost. Take me for example, I have no trouble handling abuse, operation, and legal things that take up time, but it's hard to justify $X/mo towards Tor as opposed to $X/mo towards my student loan. So, I'm not going to flat out ask for it, particularly on a relay mailing list, but that's a reason I don't do it, and I'd imagine the cost, time, and abuse are the main reasons most people opt-out.
What would be a nice dream is if we got people together who opted out for different reasons. Such that person A wants to support in money, but not technical/time/abuse-handling/etc. got together with Person B who puts in the technical/time/abuse-handling/etc. but can't put money into the system. Just an idea if there are any Person A's out there looking for a Person B like me. :)
-12xBTM
On 20.8.15 20:23, s7r wrote:
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Hello,
In the last 48 hours we went under the 'psychological' threshold of 1000 Exit Relays in the consensus. Right now, Thu Aug 20 23:57:02 UTC 2015, we have:
6234 Running relays 954 Exit relays
I think we can improve this balance. Let's do it!
This is a call for everyone: Please run Exit relays, or if you are running a middle relay turn it into an Exit relay!
I have been running high capacity Exit relays for a very long time, and I tell you it's not a headache and it will not attract any problems if you just take care of the abuse complaints.
During this very long time, 98% of the abuse complaints were automated messages which can safely be ignored (fail2ban notifications, portscans, web CMS plugins sending reports about http fetches, etc.) and the rest were from very nice people who didn't know what Tor is and how it works, but after explaining to them they actually liked the idea - gives you a really nice feeling. Only 2 times I have received email from law enforcement agents (which are just normal people like us, doing a hard job) - a complete and clear explanation was all that it took for them to fully understand and eliminate any doubt that the server in question is somehow interesting to them.
Tor is _legal_ in all sane countries! We as a community are here and I give you my word that me and others will personally assist, in the measure and ways we can, whoever runs into troubles because of running an exit, which is highly unlikely.
It is recommended to reject in your policy port 25 (it's not needed and it will blacklist you for spam messages if you leave it open). Allow all other ports, or use the reduced exit policy from torproject.org if you want to allow only what is highly necessary.
Don't think any longer about it ;)
- Email me directly any time if you need technical support in setting
things up, hardening the server or need a customized setup adapted to certain conditions.
- Email me directly any time if you have the funds needed to run a Tor
exit relay but don't know how to set it up, where to get it from or don't want to rent and run it under your real name.
- Email me directly any time if you need instructions about how to
deal with abuse complaints and short templates for replies.
For live chat come on IRC, OFTC network, #tor channel. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (MingW32)
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