On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 09:52:41PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:
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.
Whoops, thanks for the correction Roger. I guess I've been configuring exit relays for so long that I forget what it's like to configure a non-exit. :)
(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 Vidalia behavior you describe seems like a principle of least surprise to me.
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.
Then again, that was a long time ago, and maybe it's gotten harder to sustain exits these days?
I can easily imagine that folks who get their first warning from their ISP simply say "well, guess I can't run Tor at all then" and turn it off.
-andy