Hi Roger, Thanks for your answer :) It's funny that you mention dfri.se, because they e-mailed me (and all swedish relay operators i believe) yesterday and I'm lurking in their IRC channel (and #tor) as I write this. I also managed to join the tor-relays list, so I've had a lot to read lately. I'm CC'ing this to them as well, so let's see if it gets to where it's supposed to. :) Cheers! //Martin 2012/8/14 Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>

(Adding the tor-assistants cc back in -- I'm not so good at handling mail to me directly, and tor-assistants is a closed list of other Tor developers, so hopefully it isn't too impolite to add it.)

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 12:42:03PM +0200, Martin Algö wrote:

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Hello Roger,

My answers first:

- What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth do you get for that? I'm running my relay from home. I have a 100Mbit connection and for that i pay roughly $65 USD (450 SEK).

- Is it a stable hosting situation? For example, how do they handle abuse complaints so far? So far I've been running my relay for about 18 months. The Tor server uses a total of about 50Mbit constantly in both directions (I limited it because I want some bandwidth for myself as well) and I have not heard a peep from my ISP. It should be noted that my ISP (Bahnhof, Sweden) have been known for engaging in discussions about privacy in general and trying to protect their users from things like ACTA/IPRED. They even supply their own anonymity VPN service. I tried contacting them once to talk about Tor, but whoever at helpdesk that got my email didn't know what I was talking about so I gave that up, thinking that I shouldnt rock the boat unless necessary. :)

Great. I wish there were more people like you in Sweden. :)

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- Is your hosting situation one where it could make sense for us to reimburse your bandwidth costs? (Some people have a deal through their employer, friend, etc where they don't pay for hosting.) Yes. In my case, I use half my bandwidth and so it would make sense to pay me half my connection fee. Something that I would like much more though, would be a promise of economic assistance in case of juridical problems. The way i see it, I don't give any money to charity, such as Red Cross etc. but I contribute bandwidth for a value of $30-35 every month to help anonymity and uncensored access to the internet for user that need it. (Along with users that use it for bad things as well, but that is a tradeoff I'm willing to make for now.)

Good idea. Do you know about dfri.se? They are running some fast exit relays in Sweden in an organized way. I bet they could help with the legal side. I agree that it would be great to have some equivalent of the Tor Legal FAQ written with Sweden in mind. I'm cc'ing Linus (from dfri) in case he has any thoughts here.

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relay if you didn't have to pay for it? This is an interesting question! Maybe I could buy a VPS somewhere? I'm the local "IT guy" at my office so I might be able to buy a separate connection there and even get some cheap hardware. This defenitely could require some thinking on my part.

Let us know if anything comes to mind, and what we can do to help.

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- What else should we be asking here? :) What do the relay operators want? :) As stated above, for me it would mean much more to have some legal help to fall back on if (when) shit hits the fan. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that many would-be high speed relay operators don't run relays because of possible legal imlications.

Right. Do you know good Swedish lawyers who might be able to help clarify how the laws there work?

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I would love to join the discussion on the tor-relays list. I already registered, but I never got around to using any mailing lists before, so I'm not sure how to respond to your thread without breaking anything. Help a n00b will you? :)

Happy to help. I'd say just send the mail and see what happens. If you start with "I run a fast exit relay, and", I expect people will be very friendly.

Thanks! --Roger