Scroogle and Tor

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Sun, Feb 13, 2011 at 2:09 PM,  <scroogle at lavabit.com> wrote:
[snip]
> I'm getting to the point where I'm tempted to offer my two
> exit node lists (yesterday plus today, and previous six days
> plus today) to the public. If I had more confidence in the
> lists currently available to the public, I wouldn't be
> tempted to do this.

You should. The current public exit service is demonstrably incorrect.

Although it's also important to know why it's incorrect.

For example, one reason that the DNSEL is incorrect is a side effect
of that fact that they are tested to see what address they _really_
exit from. Sometimes an exit is placed behind some proxy and the
address that it claims to be is not the address anyone else sees.
But— if an exit has a policy so narrow that it can not be tested by
this process then it will not show up in the DNSEL results.

So, e.g. if I ran a scroogle only exit, it wouldn't be in the DNSEL
results.  I'm pretty sure this is the wrong failure mode for the
testing process.

Though this issue means that your non-testing based results will also
be incorrect, just in another way.

There may also be other issues with the DNSEL result which I am
unaware of. The daily/weekly cycle part just sounds like the pattern
of nodes hitting their transfer limits and shutting off.  Perhaps the
DNSEL is promptly delisting these nodes when there should be a hold-up
because the DNSEL results are cached.

As far as performance goes, you can download a list of nodes which can
reach a particular address at
https://check.torproject.org/cgi-bin/TorBulkExitList.py?ip=1.2.3.4
but, these results have the same problem with omitted nodes that I
mentioned.

As far as the annoying requests from tor goes, it would be better to
subject them to a captcha than to block them completely. Then again,
the big reason people use scroogle via tor is, as I understand it, to
avoid the annoying captchas that google often subjects tor exits to...
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