AdvTor

[Anon Mus]

Mike Perry wrote:
> Thus spake Anon Mus (my.green.lantern at googlemail.com):
>
>   
>> Well, well, well.... suddenly the problem fixes "itself"... after 20+ 
>> disconnects and 10+ "You are using a proxy which is changing your 
>> data... refusing connection.." over the past 3 days.
>>
>> Must be just another co-incidence ..funny though how it was still 
>> failing a minute prior to my post being written today. This must be 
>> similar to the DNS resolution problem (unable to resolve DNS and so 
>> failed page access) to webcrawler.com when using these servers as exits 
>> the last 4 weeks... (might be fixed now, but these are all in my exclude 
>> as exits list, so I wouldn't know).
>>
>> spfTOR1,spfTOR2,gpfTOR1,gpfTOR2,Amunet1,Amunet2,Amunet3,Amunet4,Amunet5,Amunet6,Amunet7,Amunet8,Amunet9,Amunet10,Amunet11,Amunet12,blutmagie,blutmagie2,blutmagie3,blutmagie4 
>>     
>
> That's an interesting list. It looks like you just took the top 20 fastest
> exits and listed them.
>
>   
Yes this makes it very worrying that such high volume exits are "bad" 
servers, as they grab all your circuits' exit positions. If they a 
traffic loggers (ie spies) then Tor users are in trouble.

> Are you excluding these because of proven malicious activity; because
> of poor connectivity; because they are banned from most sites; or just
> because you needed a button to make your Internet as slow as possible,
> and Tor seemed like the best choice?
>
>   

These were added because, as I already said, they were repeatedly (5+ 
times on 5 different circuits)  "unable to resolve DNS and so failed 
page access",. this is a standard privoxy message.

Prior to end August 2010, if this kind of message was received I just 
used to close the circuit and try again. Usually it would resolve by the 
3rd try. I tested these exits to see if they could resolve other urls, 
they did so with ease, no errors.

But at the end August every time I closed the circuit I got one of the 
"blutmagie,blutmagie2,blutmagie3,blutmagie4" exits again and these could 
not resolve the DNS of webcrawler.com. So I did a little investigation 
and found that ALL these were not resolving this DNS but simple (web 
based) one hop proxies put on at the end of tor (globally) could resolve 
this dns.

So I placed them all (the blutmagie ones) in my ExcludeExitNodes this 
stopped the problem... and I was able to access webcrawler.com via TOR 
for a while.

A week later however the problem re-occurred this time with ..

"Amunet1,Amunet2,Amunet3,Amunet4,Amunet5,Amunet6,Amunet7,Amunet8,Amunet9,Amunet10,Amunet11,Amunet12"

So I put all the Amunet exits on the ExcludeExitNodes as well.

The next week the problem re-occurred with 
"spfTOR1,spfTOR2,gpfTOR1,gpfTOR2" so I Excluded them also.
And with a few more exits (all German/US) in the following weeks the 
problem was cured. No problems now for 2 weeks. Web pages are as fast as 
before I excluded these nodes.

I use webcrawler.com because it is multi-search engine and it has low 
bandwidth pages so its ideal for TOr users.

(Maybe another search engine, like google.com, owns/sponsors these exits 
and is blocking the resolution of its competitor ??)


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