[tor-relays] Electronic surveillance on major tor exits

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Mon Jul 23 23:13:22 UTC 2012


> We opted for the "if we don't stay relevant to the world, Tor will never
> grow enough" route. I think that's still a good decision today.

This is probably an ok thing as everyone knows a useless network
is a dead network. So maybe in times of glut, do some release or
authority based tuning to keep the balance.

I would launch a project to map/AS/speed/etc the current relays and
base tuning/funding on that.

> I hear that running exit relays in the US is increasingly difficult these
> days, which is an extra shame because that's where a lot of Internet
> diversity is

That diversity can be true. It's kindof hard for small countries/regions to
be diverse when essentially the only people they peer with are maybe
two Tier-n's from other countries, usually piped in via their one or two
fiber links, buried, paid for and run by their own government.

One place to look for some is the EDU space. They've got tons of
bandwidth, it's a matter of finding the ear of an outranking professor
or humanities/law/whatever department since central IT usually won't.

Unfortunately, most AUP's roll down from the Tier-1's. So the only real
way to defeat that, in the US and elsewhere, is to become the ISP.
Much as torservers tries to own complaints. It's just pricier in
work, funds and responsibility.

Non-exit relays are certainly easier to deploy with nearly unlimited
diversity and speed. Perhaps keeping a PR/funding push there to
the point of glut is an easy and valid win as well. Then you're left
with just the exits.

I would accept funds to do some of this at cost plus beer, but just
as it's hard to hand them out, it can be just as hard to receive them.

Sorry, I think most of this goes in the funding thread, so please
feel free to quote any of this over to that one.


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