What am I doing wrong? - if anything

[Andrew Lewman]

On 04/07/2010 07:56 AM, Lyndsay Roger wrote:
> A few months ago I set up a tor node on a dedicated server in the UK.
> I left it running as a relay node for a few weeks and then opened it
> up as an exit node but only for a few restricted ports like web, pop
> and imap.

Great.  Thanks for running nodes!

> What I was wondering was - is this what the future holds? Get an abuse
> report, send a reply and wait for the next. I looked through the email
> archives and I have seen that some people have had worse. I guess it
> depends on the company you are working with and how much they will put
> up with.

Some people are unlucky and seem to get more abuse complaints than
others.  I ran one node for years and never received complaints.  And
then I ran a node recently and received 1 DMCA complaint a day.  After
two weeks of this, I talked to some manager at the ISP. I explained Tor,
that I'm going to respond to each one with a template, and I'm going to
automate the whole thing.  They were fine with it, as they just wanted
to know that I was aware and had a response.

It seems silly to automate responses to automated accusations, but so be
it.  Fixing the core problem of the false accusations and the weight
ISPs give to these false accusations is longer problem to tackle; and
one I couldn't automate.

> Also do I just reply to the hosting company who forwarded me the
> abuse/DMCA report or do I have to contact the abuse reporter.

You should reply to the hosting company.   In fact, you may just want to
talk/email the support manager and explain what you're doing.

> The US
> company said I should file a DMCA Counter claim and work it out with
> the person filing the DMCA claim. 

I believe the dmca counter claim advice to be incorrect.  The dmca claim
is generally used for getting content re-instated after a takedown.
However, I'm not a lawyer.  Perhaps any lawyers on this list can respond.

-- 
Andrew Lewman
The Tor Project
pgp 0x31B0974B

Website: https://www.torproject.org/
Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/
Identi.ca: torproject