Hello everyone!
Some of you might have noticed that there is a visible drop of relays on our consensus-health website.[1] The reason for that is that we kicked roughly 600 non-exit relays out of the network yesterday. In fact, only a small fraction of them had the guard flag, so the vast majority were middle-only relays. We don't have any evidence that these relays were doing any attack, but there are attacks possible which relays could perform from the middle position. Therefore, we decided we'd remove those relays for our users' safety sake.
While we were already tracking some of the relays for a while, a big chunk of them was also independently reported by a cypherpunk and nusenu helped analyzing the data. Thanks to both of them from our side.
Foe what it is worth: a large part of those relays did not set any valid contact info and/or when we tried to contact some of the relays' operators the emails bounced. However, we sometimes need to have ways to reach relay operators, be it for debugging purposes or for helping them with relay misconfiguration. Thus, please set a valid contact info when running relays.
Finally, anyone running relays: try to get connected to the community so we can build some trust among each other. That seems to be an essential part in our long-term strategy to fight bad relays trying to enter our network.
Georg