Time Warner bad / VPS recommendations

[Ted Smith]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 22:03 +0100, Mitar wrote:

> But on the other hand I am seeing many e-mails like "I would like to
> contribute to Tor but my ISP/university/mom does not allow me/has
> blocked me/does not want to hassle". So maybe those could cooperate in
> a way of putting together such nodes.
> 
> 
> Mitar

How about this:

TorProject has a paypal donations account that people (like those people
who cannot run a node, but wish to contribute) can send donations to.
Those donations, in turn, are requested by node operators who run
high-bandwidth, permissive-exit-policy (I'd think no more restrictive
than the default) nodes at cost to themselves. Additionally, TorProject
could host a list of node operators that either don't qualify for the
above request process or need more than it can offer to allow users to
donate directly to node operators. 

Another possibility (albeit much more extreme) is to allow a "donation
link" metadata item for Tor nodes. This removes any dependency on the
Tor Project handling funds.

Even if the funds are somewhat diminutive, I think this would provide a
bit of incentive to start running a node and to keep running a node in
the face of censorship.

Thoughts? This is spur-of-the-moment, and I'm sure it has holes.
Hopefully not big, huge, exploitable ones.
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