[tor-relays-universities] Tor on Campus

[Alex Ryan]

Another related way around this issue that I don’t think has been mentioned so far is running middle relays. My university gives us unrestricted internet access and public IP’s in the student residential housing, so last year I experimented with running an exit relay in my dorm room. Despite the fairly restrictive exit policy, it still got blocked from the network after a few months because of abuse complaints received by the university. I talked to the IT people and got it back online, but when the same thing happened again after a few months I decided to switch to running as a middle relay.

Obviously exit relays are in more critical demand than middle relays, but middle relay traffic is completely opaque to network administrators and middle relays should never receive abuse complaints. This makes them an attractive option since they don’t require the approval of any university employees and they pose no credible threat to the university or its network. I’ve successfully convinced a number of my friends to run middle relays in their dorm rooms and none of them have experienced any problems so far.

Finally, getting an middle relay up and running with the official support of the university might be a good way to ease in to the subject and start to demystify Tor. It’s a fairly harmless proposal, and it shouldn’t be hard to convince the IT people to support it. Then, once everyone is comfortable with the middle relay and it’s had no issues for some time, the idea of switching to an exit relay can be proposed.

Cheers!

Alex Ryan
Caltech Class of 2017

> On Sep 25, 2014, at 10:53 PM, April Glaser <april at eff.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 9/22/14 11:25 AM, Nik wrote:
>> On 09/20/2014 03:33 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>>> Check out https://compass.torproject.org/ <https://compass.torproject.org/>
>>> 
>>> Click on 'select only relays suitable for exit position' and then in the
>>> Country box put in United States and Canada. Then ask for 100 results.
>>> Then click submit, and scroll down, and look on the right-most column
>>> (Autonomous System).
>>> 
>>> You can click on the link in the Fingerprint column to see some of the
>>> details you list above.
>> This is great, thank you.  Very helpful.
>> 
>> I suppose this:
>> 
>>> Part of the general problem though is that many Tor exit relay operators
>>> don't really want publicity about their choice
>> is a pretty compelling reason *not* to explicitly highlight exits run at
>> universities (at least not without the operator's consent).  Maybe
>> something opt-in would be possible?  Although it might be sort of
>> pointless if only a couple university people/groups wanted to publicize
>> that they run an exit.
>> 
>>> I wonder if somebody should start doing a "highlight a Tor exit relay
>>> operator" weekly column or something, to make it more commonplace
>>> to admit that you're running an exit relay? As an additional bird to
>>> kill, putting a human face on exit relays
> 
> 
>> I'm extremely interested in ways to encourage more open conversations
>> about exits, "normalize" the whole process a bit, and, as you say,
>> "[put] a human face on exit relays."  I think this is really important.
>> 
>> It's amazing, and very frustrating, how much FUD, mystique, and just
>> outright wrong information about Tor in general and exits specifically
>> circulates among many Com Sci/engineering students (and even some
>> professors).
>> 
>> Nik
>> 
>> On 09/20/2014 03:33 PM, Roger Dingledine wrote:
>>> On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 11:41:24PM -0500, Nik wrote:
>>>> (A) A list of currently active exits at universities, filterable by
>>>> country at least (laws/regulations are different).
>>>> 
>>>> It would be really great to have some sections here for each university
>>>> listing like: the exit policy (or policies), the way they get around
>>>> problems like journal subscriptions, how they handle abuse complaints,
>>>> how long the exit has been running, etc.
>>> Check out https://compass.torproject.org/ <https://compass.torproject.org/>
>>> 
>>> Click on 'select only relays suitable for exit position' and then in the
>>> Country box put in United States and Canada. Then ask for 100 results.
>>> Then click submit, and scroll down, and look on the right-most column
>>> (Autonomous System).
>>> 
>>> You can click on the link in the Fingerprint column to see some of the
>>> details you list above.
>>> 
>>> Part of the general problem though is that many Tor exit relay operators
>>> don't really want publicity about their choice -- they've gotten enough
>>> buy-in locally to run the relay, but they don't really want CNN to show
>>> up wanting to interview their dean about why she is endorsing Tor.
>>> 
>>> I wonder if somebody should start doing a "highlight a Tor exit relay
>>> operator" weekly column or something, to make it more commonplace
>>> to admit that you're running an exit relay? As an additional bird to
>>> kill, putting a human face on exit relays might help answer some of the
>>> concerns I get from people (even otherwise smart Tor fans) who say that
>>> the only people who can afford to run stable exit relays are people who
>>> are collaborating with the authorities to undermine Tor.
>>> 
>>> --Roger
> 
> This is an interesting idea. Anyone else have any ideas of ways to demystify for students and uni administrators (and everyone, really!)?
> 
>  Maybe a monthly instead of a weekly series might be more likely.
>> 
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>>> 
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> April Glaser
> Electronic Frontier Foundation
> 415-436-9333 x154 
> support our work: https://eff.org/join <https://eff.org/join>
> 
> 
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