[tor-relays] Tor relays and exits exposing Privoxy publicly

[Aaron Hopkins]

On Sun, 10 Nov 2013, Claudio wrote:

> You're right, just a few actually do proxy. With a few seconds timeout
> only 162.243.5.88 and 78.47.41.125 do to me at the moment.

Good to know.  I don't see a contact for 162.243.5.88 and I sent mail to the
contact address listed for 78.47.41.125 in September but didn't get a
response.

> Just out of curiosity, what would be the reason for leaving such port
> open but inactive?

For me, it is to try to waste TCP sockets and OS threads of whichever botnet
is trying to hit 8118 on all Tor nodes over and over, in an effort to slow
them down.  Though I'm currently holding open 43000 connections from them, I
don't think it has had much of an effect, unfortunately.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarpit_(networking) for more background. 
It talks about IP-level and SMTP-level tarpits, but my HTTP tarpit is
similar in theory, but operates at the HTTP protocol level.

                                     -- Aaron