[tor-relays] BitTorrent complaint

[Matt Joyce]

On 11/04/13 20:00, Moritz Bartl wrote:
> On 11.04.2013 12:15, theo at caber.nl wrote:
>> If we want to avoid the packet-dropping problem: We could also reject
>> the IP-addresses of those sites with torrc. What is your opinion about
>> that Moritz? And, would it ok for the authorities and users with little
>> bandwith if I reject ~100 ip-adresses? (Not that I am going to)
> Apart from the last section of my answer to bartels: Yes, listing 100+
> IPs in the exit policy is not very nice for the Tor network either. :(
>
> I guess the simple answer would be:
>
> 1) Allow everything (except port 25, which is reasonable to block)
> 2) If you don't want the DMCA spam notices, use the reduced exit policy.
>
It's not ideal if everyone does it however that's primarily due to the
distribution mechanism, for now it is sending the *entire* file every
time over HTTP there are however ways this could be distributed better
if the community of exit operators were to decide such was necessary and
the size of the descriptors thus began to increase such as versioning
and distributing diffs to clients a conversation along the lines of:

Client: Request descriptor for relay with $FINGERPRINT have revision X.
DirMirror: Descriptor for relay $FINGERPRINT diff revision X current
revision Y data follows.

This would increase the necessary storage space on each mirror a little
using a storage system like git, hg or svn use code from these could
probably be reused, or even just use hg as a dependency and make a local
repo with no daemon but unless everyone is changing their descriptors in
major ways on a regular basis I suspect it would be quite small
especially if older copies were expired after a reasonable period of
time maybe 30 days and clients with older versions are just sent the
full current version so only clients that use the network very
infrequently would be actually downloading the entire policy.  We are
talking plain text files here too so I cant see the storage issue being
a massive one given that HDD space is inexpensive now and even
inexpensive VPS servers typically offer hundreds of GB of it, the main
issue would be bandwidth which honestly I suspect would be lower or at
worst similar if we only distributed diffs to the majority of clients.

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