eliminating bogus port 43 exits

Anon Mus my.green.lantern at googlemail.com
Sun Jun 14 15:44:12 UTC 2009


Alexander Cherepanov wrote:
> Hello, Scott!
> You wrote to or-talk at seul.org, scream at nonvocalscream.com on Sun, 14 Jun 2009 01:15:43 -0500 (CDT):
>
>   
>>      Now, another person on this list has argued that the RFC's should be
>> ignored and that IANA should be ignored.  I remain unconvinced that doing
>> either would be a good idea.
>>     
>
> The main discord here seems to arise from totally different approaches 
> to the question. You are building a whitelist while default tor exit 
> policy is a blacklist. IMHO it's hard to constructively discuss amending 
> blacklist from whitelist POV.
>
>   
>> Having a set of standard port numbers at which
>> one may expect to access standard services is valuable,
>>     
>
> Sure it is valuable but AFAIU tor is not there to bring order back to
> Internet.
>
>   
The thing is the port numbers list is NOT an exclusivity list... other 
people & systems may use these ports if they wish.

Its a misconception that these ports were exclusively assigned to the 
stated systems. Its only true that if you run/design these systems then 
you are asked (not required) to design using them (and only them).

The idea was to make it easier to open certain ports in corporate 
firewalls  for common services.

There is no form of enforcement of ANY sort, either of..

ports ONLY for certain services

or

services ONLY on certain  ports.

Of course, websites & organizations have the right to choose which ports 
they use for which services and open/close. Anyone trying to inflict 
that kind of system on any "internet" user community should STOP doing 
so immediately. Its called "port blocking" and its unacceptable.

Therefore ALL traffic, on ALL ports, are LEGITIMATE traffic, regardless 
of whether they comply with IANA's list or not.

My understanding was that Tor allows node operators to best configure 
their node to make the most of their particular resources (eg to get 
round fascist firewalls etc), as opposed to blocking ports because of 
arbitrary ideas of what services might/might not be used on them.

Of course, fascist firewalls are commonly the reason why a Tor user 
would set up communication over (more often not open) ports, like port 
43, as it will not be blocked. And so, petty administrators are employed 
to reduce this supposed "unauthorized" traffic (tut tut) to a minimum.

I suppose some of these bureaucrats will use the IANA list as evidence 
of malpractice.



> Alexander Cherepanov
>
> P.S. There is neither X-Mailer nor User-Agent headers in your mails. 
> That's cool but missing In-Reply-To and References is annoying. Do you 
> use some email sanitizing software or just hardened MUA? If it's not a 
> secret of course:-)
>
>
>   



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