Fwd: Abuse Message

[Mike Perry]

Thus spake Karsten N. (tor-admin at privacyfoundation.de):

> Am 02.10.2010 19:08, schrieb SiNA:
> > Can anyone give me some direction please? specifically in  regards to
> > German ISPs.
> We can recommend leaseweb.nl (ok for long time) or coolhousing.net
> (Prag) (not tested for long time).
> 
> And you may reduce your exit policy. There was a blog posting at
> https://blog.torproject.org with some recommendations for the exit
> policy. Switch to a whitlist of open ports:
> 
>  ExitPolicy: accept *:80, accept *:443, accept *:995, ... reject *:*
> 
> It reduces the the number of copyright infringement to 2-3 per month.

Here is the link:
https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tips-running-exit-node-minimal-harassment

For us it reduced it from 50/day to 0.

> Btw: we offer a tor partnership program to help German tor exit admins.
> See: https://www.privacyfoundation.de/verein/themen/

Also one thing to consider is forming a limited liability entity to
protect you from lawsuits, esp if you are a resident of the US where
everyone is lawsuit happy.

This is because another source of potential harassment are web
services that threaten to sue you over people who scrape them over
Tor. For some reason, some companies see legal threats as a better
solution than say, implementing a captcha (although no one as of yet
has actually brought a lawsuit against a Tor node operator to court).

In the US, the cost of setting up an LLC with good privacy protections
is between $100-$1000/yr, depending upon the state and the services
you contract from independent providers (such as preparing and filing
the paperwork for you, and phone+mail forwarding). States that have
laws that make this process easy are Nevada, New Mexico, Wyoming,
Montana, and to a lesser extent Delaware.  States to avoid include
Massachusetts and California (though the latter cannot be avoided if
your ISP is also in California).

It is legal for non-US citizens to form LLCs, which should give you
some interesting privacy and legal protections for running your Tor
node.

I've been pondering adding this information to that blog post, but I'm
not sure exactly how necessary it really is, and I didn't want to
scare people off, as so far there have been no court cases against
operators in the US. Also, if you don't have sufficient personal
assets to make it worthwhile to sue you, it doesn't really matter.


-- 
Mike Perry
Mad Computer Scientist
fscked.org evil labs
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