On 11/03/2013 at 6:51 AM, Moritz Bartl wrote:

Where did you copy that policy from?

It is the default policy that was installed with Vidalia.

A more conservative approach would be whitelisting, ie. Only allow specific ports while blocking all others. The "reduced exit policy" is such a whitelist.

Thanks for the link, I have implemented that reduced exit policy.

Considering that you run your relay from what looks like a residential (home) connection, you might want to further reduce the number of allowed ports.

It is indeed a residential connection :) Pretty decent speeds, unlimited bandwidth: http://www.speedtest.net/result/3001260636.png

Thank you for running an exit relay!

I wasn't using my connection for much of anything else and after reading about Tor in the Snowden files I figured I'd better contribute!

-Jamie M.

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I don't think this is the right place for you to try and justify your refusal to pay for content people create. I think most people on this list would prefer you keep political opinions not related to tor off list.

Cheers

Ramo

On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 11:50:58PM +0100, Lukas Erlacher wrote:

Let me chime in here in regards to torrents to be perhaps not the devil's, but the radical's advocate.

I'm sure everyone here will agree that a good case can be made that copyright laws as they stand today are a perversion of, and counter-productive to, their original stated intention of "advancement of the arts and sciences", and just as leaking secret information and evidence of wrongdoing is a protest and defense against governments that try to hinder freedom and transparency, so is distributing copyrighted cultural goods a protest and defense against content industries (that are often justifiably compared to criminal organisations ("MAFIAA") due to their frequently corrupt and abusive conduct) that attempt to censor culture in order to excise maximum profit from it. Cultural goods that should be preserved and made available to everyone rot away every day because they were not allowed to be preserved and distributed.

Do not indict torrents because it's all "movies and porn of horrible quality" - that is defamation. The hollywood movies and the porn may not have much "cultural value", but who is the arbiter of what "cultural value" is? And even if it was found unanimously that porn does not concern culture (hah!), then for every TB of porn and hollywood shite you block, there are Megabytes of bona fide culture liberated from the shackles of copyright that you throw to the wolves, saying "it's just torrents". And doesn't wikileaks use mostly torrents for distributing their releases?

When you block torrenting, you're making a decision to censor information and speech based on it being done using a method that is predominantly used for "illegitimate", "illegal" activity; in that case, why not shutter Tor entirely? We all know it's mainly used by fraudsters and other criminals, and right now at this time we know that 80% of Tor clients are zombies from a botnet.

Censor torrents because your provider will shut you down if you generate DMCA complaints and C&D's; censor them because you truly believe that the torrents are a necessary sacrifice to allow the Tor network to continue to function; don't censor them because they don't contain worthwhile speech that deserves to be protected. _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays

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Lukas Erlacher:

...

your refusal to pay for content people create.

That's a silly smear.

If an endless tsunami of torrent traffic makes it so Tor users can't buy music off bandcamp - a site where the artist gets the lion's share, and where some small indie artists are getting enough to wait tables 32 hours a week instead of 40, and thus spend 8 more hours a week on music - is that a problem?

...

not related to tor

That's just plain silly.

Not as silly as you think, but the outright blocking vs finding ways to throttle is more a discussion worth having. I suspect most of the Silent Majority(tm), if polled, would rather throttle than block.

I *swear* there was a paper on this other than the 2009 one I posted the other day.

Best, - -Gordon M.

On Mon, 4 Nov 2013 14:38:40 -0500, Paul Syverson paul.syverson@nrl.navy.mil wrote:

On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 08:18:29AM -0800, Gordon Morehouse wrote: [snip]

...

...

That's just plain silly.

Not as silly as you think, but the outright blocking vs finding ways to throttle is more a discussion worth having. I suspect most of the Silent Majority(tm), if polled, would rather throttle than block.

I *swear* there was a paper on this other than the 2009 one I posted the other day.

Are you perhaps thinking of "Throttling Tor Bandwidth Parasites"? Available at http://www.syverson.org/ or http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~jansen/publications.shtml

That's one of them, here are a couple sources of information on throttling bandwidth hogs:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/research-problem-adaptive-throttling-tor-cl...

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9368

Throttling is tricky and not a panacea. This is noted in the above paper and analyzed in some detail in "How Low Can You Go: Balancing Performance with Anonymity in Tor", also available at http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~jansen/publications.shtml

Indeed. I suspect it's also better than doing nothing, and better than any attempt to block certain types of traffic altogether.

Thanks! -Gordon M.

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Lukas Erlacher:

Let me chime in here in regards to torrents to be perhaps not the devil's, but the radical's advocate.

A lot of the people wishing to handle bittorrent are aware of these arguments and may not wish to block it so much as throttle the hell out of it.

And thus we find ourselves sort of considering to act like Comcast, except in a good-faith defense of our network. m(

I'm sure everyone here will agree that a good case can be made that copyright laws as they stand today are a perversion of, and counter-productive to, their original stated intention of "advancement of the arts and sciences", and just as leaking secret information and evidence of wrongdoing is a protest and defense against governments that try to hinder freedom and transparency, so is distributing copyrighted cultural goods a protest and defense against content industries (that are often justifiably compared to criminal organisations ("MAFIAA") due to their frequently corrupt and abusive conduct) that attempt to censor culture in order to excise maximum profit from it. Cultural goods that should be preserved and made available to everyone rot away every day because they were not allowed to be preserved and distributed.

Yes, and I'd actually love to see a sort of 'Torrent Library of Congress' bots that downloads stuff from various trackers in order of lowest # of seeds, so it doesn't vanish. One of my many ideas I'll never have time to do until I'm 80.

Do not indict torrents because it's all "movies and porn of horrible quality" - that is defamation. The hollywood movies and the porn may not have much "cultural value", but who is the arbiter of what "cultural value" is? And even if it was found unanimously that porn does not concern culture (hah!), then for every TB of porn and hollywood shite you block, there are Megabytes of bona fide culture liberated from the shackles of copyright that you throw to the wolves, saying "it's just torrents". And doesn't wikileaks use mostly torrents for distributing their releases?

Yes, yes and yes, but I would vastly prefer if Little Bobby Torrents from Schenectady downloading the testament to American culture that is "Bang Bus 32" didn't impact the bandwidth of people trying to use Tor to get important information around. Yeah, I just made a judgement about relative quality of information there, and that's ... okay. See http://radioornot.com/site/?p=5181

When you block torrenting, you're making a decision to censor information and speech based on it being done using a method that is predominantly used for "illegitimate", "illegal" activity; in that case, why not shutter Tor entirely? We all know it's mainly used by fraudsters and other criminals, and right now at this time we know that 80% of Tor clients are zombies from a botnet.

Who said anything about blocking? Maybe others. I'd prefer throttling. There are many legitimate uses for torrents. Throttling, maybe based on amount of data transferred (if that could ever be known at the edge(s) of the Tor network) is a better, though not perfect solution.

Censor torrents because your provider will shut you down if you generate DMCA complaints and C&D's; censor them because you truly believe that the torrents are a necessary sacrifice to allow the Tor network to continue to function; don't censor them because they don't contain worthwhile speech that deserves to be protected.

Not trying to censor anything, personally, not that I run an exit node (yet).

Best, - -Gordon M.