ATTN: for-profit Tor operators

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 10:36:36AM -0600, Dan Treiman wrote:

> I'm tentatively interested - I have some servers and the bandwidth.   
> (I'm in the US, with locations in Minnesota and Texas).
> Let me know how this would work.

I've had a number of people contact me off-list, thanks
for the feedback. If anyone sees potential technical or liability
issues feel free to criticize.

The core idea is to have high-quality Tor servers in different
jurisdictions, owned by different legal entities or persons,
to manage their pool of authenticated users.

Operators charge their subscribers to cover their costs. It might
make sense for several operators e.g. in the U.S. to create
an umbrella/front organization to reduce the overhead of
accounting, marketing, etc. Marketing can be global, 
in fact (Yahoo or Google AdWords would come to mind).
Similiar could work for EU, or at least Germany.

It would be good to achieve balanced traffic flow (as much
traffic is entering your node as leaves your node), so that
there won't be a need for monetary compensation between
operators. Arguably, throttling traffic to a lowest
common denominator (say, 10 MBit/s) should take care of 
it automatically, given that each node has about the same 
number of users.

Whether each operator maintains their own authenticated
users pool, or there will be a common authenticated user
pool (this will require cash flow among operators, and
would violate the compartmentalization rule) is TBD.
I think each operator taking care of their own users
has less potential issues (costs and thus charges to
users will vary somewhat from operator to operator).

I'm suggesting that users authenticate by a server-side
prepackaged (containing the secret) OpenVPN installer. 

I think for starters we should just stick with anonymized
web access (at the very least definitely no mail and P2P
because of easy abuse potential).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820            http://www.leitl.org
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