How to contact tor-ops?

[Paul Syverson]

Hi Robert et al,

On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 05:58:38PM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 18, 2006 at 11:46:16PM +0100, linux wrote:
> > today I have started a tor server. As described in the documentation I have to 
> > inform the tor ops about this fact.
> > So I have send an email to  tor-ops at freehaven.net .
> > But now I get an reply:
> [snip]
> > syverson at fw5540.nrl.navy.mil... Deferred: Connection timed out with 
> [snip]
> > WHAT DOES IT MEAN? Who is: syverson at fw5540.nrl.navy.mil?
> 
> Paul Syverson is one of the Tor folks: http://tor.eff.org/people
> 
> I believe his mail is down for a day or so.
> 

Yes. My mail servers were down over the weekend.

> > navy.mil scares me a little bit.
> 
> It shouldn't. We need as many different groups as possible caring
> about Tor and wanting anonymity. Anonymous communications on the
> Internet is best defended by bringing all parties who want it into
> the same camp so they carry more weight. See the first section of
> http://tor.eff.org/overview for some more details.
> 

It's not my position to tell you what to fear, but I can inform your
choice. Tor was conceived, designed, developed, and deployed entirely
by a combination of career employees of the Naval Research Laboratory
(me), and people under contract to NRL to work on it (Roger and
Nick). (Not to mention many significant volunteers, especially over
the last few years.) It is the third version of onion routing, the
first two of which were done entirely by career employees of the Naval
Research Lab.  All of this has been publicly posted for many
years. You can see more history and background at
http://www.onion-router.net/. Since 2004, ongoing development of the
Tor network per se has not been part of any NRL project.  The bulk of
funding for that during 2005 was from the EFF. Work specifically on
hidden services over Tor is ongoing at NRL, and FreeHaven was also
funded to work on that (to a much smaller extent than previously)
until early 2006.

Hope that helps,
Paul