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?