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Roger Dingledine:
On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 06:12:47PM -0700, Andy Isaacson wrote:
That's correct, it takes a deliberate action on the part of the administrator to become a relay; and another deliberate action to become an exit relay.
Actually, that second part isn't true. Once you decide to become a relay, the default is to exit to most popular ports.
I don't think this is a good enough reason these days, when people who haven't read the fine fine print are putting them up on VPSes. A friend of mine did it and had to get his Linode IP changed after getting on a bunch of blacklists in like two days.
(If you're using Vidalia to configure your relay, it makes you choose whether you want to be a non-exit relay or an exit relay. But just Tor by itself, the default exit policy is in the man page.)
The main reason for this choice is the number of people who've told us that they are only able to run exit relays because "it's what Tor does when you run a relay", and their institution wouldn't let them do it if it required a manual config change to become an exit.
Yeah... you guys would know better than me about that, but speaking from the perspective of a small fish, the exit-as-default torrc is a serious "WTF?" and always has been, given potential legal trouble in privacy-hostile countries.
$.02
Best, - -Gordon M.