more letters from the feds

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 1/28/07, Fabian Keil <freebsd-listen at fabiankeil.de> wrote:
> "Anthony DiPierro" <or at inbox.org> wrote:
>
> > That brings up an idea, though.  Are there certain common perfectly
> > legitimate things that exit nodes are being used for, that maybe some
> > hidden services could be set up to take the load off?
>
> I guess the most obvious and perfectly legitimate thing to
> use exit nodes for is anonymous communication on the net.
>
> I don't understand how using hidden services would take
> off any load though. If a hidden service does the job
> of an exit node you might as well consider it as one.
>
Hidden services don't require exit nodes, so if exit nodes are the
bottleneck, then moving traffic from exit nodes to middleman nodes
will improve the entire network.

As for "if a hidden service does the job of an exit node you might as
well consider it as one", I'm not really sure what that means.  What
if a hidden service does *some* of the jobs of an exit node?  Do you
count it as part of one?

> After all it's request IP address will be visible to
> the public in which case the risk for the operator
> stays the same (unless requests are routed through
> the Tor network again, in which case it would only
> add latency).
>
The risk is the same for the same services, but there's no requirement
for a hidden service to, for instance, forward POST requests, which I
would think greatly reduces the risk.  If one runs an exit node,
they're agreeing to forward all requests, not just GET requests or GET
requests without any parameters, and not even just HTTP traffic (as
was pointed out, any traffic can go over port 80).

Anthony