[tor-relays] Amazon abuse report

[Gordon Morehouse]

On Fri, 01 Nov 2013 17:48:44 +0000, Paritesh Boyeyoko <parity.boy at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Friday 01 Nov 2013 05:37:14 I wrote:
> >The advice on how to manage exit problems seems to
> > be very sound and Tor is defensible because it is being abused by
> > torrenting also.
> > 
> 
> ...and this is something else I don't quite understand.  People who know about 
> Tor (which obviously includes exit operators) are well aware of the stress 
> that BitTorrent puts on the Tor network.
> 
> The paper http://planete.inrialpes.fr/papers/TorTraffic-NSS10.pdf shows 54.48% 
> of the traffic passing through the sample exit nodes was BiTorrent traffic.
> 
> Myself and others (I'm sure) look forward to the day when the Tor network 
> comprises 100,000+ 100Mb/s nodes.  However, until that time comes I would 
> think that exit node operators would (wrong choice of words incoming) make 
> more effort to use a whitelisted exit policy, thereby starving BitTorrent of 
> bandwidth, and forcing those users away from this "free VPN".  The likes of 
> Vuze (Azureus) don't help the situation by offering Tor as an option.
> 
> Would it be worth putting together selection of template Exit Policies which 
> exit node operators can cut & paste into their torrc?  Or (and this is more a 
> dev question) have an "include" directive where separate policy files can be 
> specified (and therefore substituted), something like this:
> 
> ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/mail.exit
> ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/rdp.exit
> ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/web.exit
> ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/chat.exit

I *love* the idea of an conf.d/ style exit config.

> Combine this with a default reject *:* policy and it *may* lead to a change of 
> culture and squeeze BitTorrent out.  It may even help reduce the number of 
> DMCA notices that exit operators get.

I would very much like to see the default policy to be no-exit, because as I mentioned before I suspect we're losing some nodes started up by noobs who then get screamed at and just shut them down, without ever really becoming part of the community.  It needs to be as easy as possible to run a relay, and given that one *can* face legal consequences in some jurisdictions over what goes into and out of a computer one rents, no-exit should be the default.

Best,
-Gordon M.