[tor-relays] DMCA letters

[Matt Joyce]

I think you have probably gotten unlucky here in all honesty given the
traffic you are pushing over there and having an issue so early on don't
take it as an indication of expected rates either, I use the recommended
reduced exit policy on both of my relays on is 20Mbit capacity and has
been running about 6 months, I've yet to receive anything in the way of
DMCA or abuse complaints about that one as yet, the newest one is a
large relay which has actually been running just one day less than your
one over there, however it's sitting on a 1Gbps connection and as of
today averaging on the order of around 219.40 Mbit/s (110Mbit each
direction) having transferred 16.45TiB, in the two weeks since it was
first activated, the rate has been rising most of that time such that
1.87TiB of that transfer was yesturday, 2.21TiB is the estimate for
today.  I'm so glad it's unmetered xD.

You can see the traffic stats for it on the relay info page at
http://torexit2.mttjocy.co.uk/ I hope that helps at least to settle some
of your concerns that it might scale linearly, were it to do so then
this bandwidth would be producing them at rate approximately 20 times
more frequently or around 40 per 16 days ~2.5 letters a day which is
significantly higher than the 0 actually received.

So it's either unfortunate luck on your part of they are doing a lot
more careful checking before sending their random notes out than they
appear to be and figured out that I'm not the type to scare easy if they
even had a case let alone when they are blowing smoke.  But I would
highly doubt that unless they are burning a few hundred doing a detailed
background check that would actually pick up something like minor civil
settlements before sending any notices it's not something you would find
on a casual google, and if they *were* doing that yet apparently still
not coming up with the simple idea of err type the IP address into
google and don't waste your time and money when it comes back saying
it's a tor exit node well that would be going beyond stupid to be fair.

On 12/03/13 07:41, jvoss at altsci.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've been running a Tor exit node on my new server for 16 days. Today I received my second automated DMCA infringement notice from HBO. I sent them the boilerplate you see at the bottom of the message both times. My colo provider Hurricane Electric understands Tor, which is awesome. I don't think it'll be an issue, so I'm happy with this. I'm wondering if anyone receives a large number of DMCA infringement notices and whether there was a resolution. It would certainly make my life a little bit more difficult to send more than one of these per week. When I got my first letter I was pushing 5 Mbps (megabits) and now I'm pushing 9 Mbps. I've set the RelayBandwidthRate to 5120 KB which should give a max rate of 41 Mbps. If infringement notices increases linearly with traffic, this could become an issue.
>
> I'm happy to share the infringement notices if anyone is interested.
>
> I followed a few of the tips from https://blog.torproject.org/running-exit-node , I got a separate IP address and I reduced the exit policy. I plan to update the reverse dns. I don't feel like reducing the exit policy does anything because BitTorrent was designed to run on any high port. Also, reducing the exit policy blocks researchers who are doing port scans and header grabbing over Tor. That's a point of contention for me because I know legitimate researchers use Tor for that purpose. Does anyone have any data or anecdotes on how exit policy affects malicious use of Tor vs legitimate use of Tor?
>
> Btw, my server is 216.218.134.12. I'm running a patched version of tor 0.2.3.25 which fixes a few bugs I found in buffer events. See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7788 for more info. Uptime is now 6 days, 13 days without a crash.
>
> Thanks,
> Javantea
>
> -------------------
>
> Dear Andrew Martin:
>
> The IP address in question is a Tor exit node.
> https://www.torproject.org/overview.html
>
> There is little we can do to trace this matter further. As can be seen
> from the overview page, the Tor network is designed to make tracing of
> users impossible. The Tor network is run by some 2500 volunteers who
> use the free software provided by the Tor Project to run Tor routers.
> Client connections are routed through multiple relays, and are
> multiplexed together on the connections between relays. The system
> does not record logs of client connections or previous hops.
>
> This is because the Tor network is a censorship resistance, privacy,
> and anonymity system used by whistle blowers, journalists, Chinese
> dissidents skirting the Great Firewall, abuse victims, stalker
> targets, the US military, and law enforcement, just to name a few.
> See https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en for more info.
>
> Unfortunately, some people misuse the network. However, compared to
> the rate of legitimate use (the IP address in question processes 
> approximately 11 megabits of traffic per second), abuse complaints are
> rare.
> https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en
>
> This is the second e-mail from you that I am replying to. The only 
> thing that has changed is that I have increased the bandwidth to 9 
> megabits per second.
>
> If you have further questions, feel free to contact me at 
>  ------------
>
> Sincerely,
>  -----------
> _______________________________________________
> tor-relays mailing list
> tor-relays at lists.torproject.org
> https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays


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