[tor-relays] Tor and Freenode

[Markus Hitter]

Hello all,

after yesterday watching "State of the Onion", a speech held at 31C3 recently, I spontanuously decided to also run a Tor relay. After some back and forth it appears to be running fine on my OpenWRT based router. The only ORPort is 9001, which is also the only hole punched into the firewall, I hope I did this right.

Today I wanted to continue at Freenode IRC, like I did for years, not even using an anonymous connection. But they wouldn't let me in:

[12:02] * You are banned from this server- Your tor exit node must not allow connections to freenode (tor exit node (chat.freenode.net:8000)).  Email tor-kline at freenode.net when corrected. (2015/1/24 09.41)

I understand that my router and my PC share the same IP address to the remaining internet and IRC operators try to identify users by their IP address (which isn't possible). Reading up on the matter I found two texts:

http://www.freenode.org/policy.shtml

"The freenode network welcomes Tor users"

http://www.freenode.org/irc_servers.shtml#tor

"If you do want to be a Tor exit node and still use freenode, you will have to configure your exit policy to block all of the IRC ports we use, in addition to ports 80 and 443 as these are used for webchat."

To me this sounds like "We welcome it, but please block all of its usage". They recommend to add a "reject *:*" rule, but that means the relay is no longer a relay, right? And blocking port 80 and 443 means Tor to become useless.


As I can't find much on the matter by googling: is this actually a misalignment of Freenodes' statement to freedom as bad as it looks? If yes, what could I do about it? I'm a fairly experienced hobbyist hacker and admin, so I wouldn't fear writing some code.


Cheers,
Markus

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Dipl. Ing. (FH) Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/