On Fri, 01 Nov 2013 11:22:19 -0700, Nelson nelson@net2wireless.net wrote:
Please excuse my ignorance operating Tor relays, but if I run an exit node on Windows 7 and use something like Peerblock and correspoding block lists of P2P sites, wouldn't this be somewhat effective in stopping this sort of undesired traffic on Tor?
Completely aside from the ethical and censorship-related buzzsaw you're about to run into for posting this (perennial) question, I believe some actual developers on Tor have written a paper about the problems with Bittorrent et al (and I think there's a more specific one than the Why Tor Is Slow[1] paper) but I can't currently find it. Anybody know?
1. https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/roadmaps/2009-03-11-performance.pdf
NB: the above paper is from 2009.
Best, -Gordon M.
On 11/1/2013 10:48 AM, Paritesh Boyeyoko wrote:
On Friday 01 Nov 2013 05:37:14 I wrote:
The advice on how to manage exit problems seems to be very sound and Tor is defensible because it is being abused by torrenting also.
...and this is something else I don't quite understand. People who know about Tor (which obviously includes exit operators) are well aware of the stress that BitTorrent puts on the Tor network.
The paper http://planete.inrialpes.fr/papers/TorTraffic-NSS10.pdf shows 54.48% of the traffic passing through the sample exit nodes was BiTorrent traffic.
Myself and others (I'm sure) look forward to the day when the Tor network comprises 100,000+ 100Mb/s nodes. However, until that time comes I would think that exit node operators would (wrong choice of words incoming) make more effort to use a whitelisted exit policy, thereby starving BitTorrent of bandwidth, and forcing those users away from this "free VPN". The likes of Vuze (Azureus) don't help the situation by offering Tor as an option.
Would it be worth putting together selection of template Exit Policies which exit node operators can cut & paste into their torrc? Or (and this is more a dev question) have an "include" directive where separate policy files can be specified (and therefore substituted), something like this:
ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/mail.exit ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/rdp.exit ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/web.exit ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/chat.exit
Combine this with a default reject *:* policy and it *may* lead to a change of culture and squeeze BitTorrent out. It may even help reduce the number of DMCA notices that exit operators get.
Thoughts?
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