[tor-talk] What relay does really help the TOR project?

[Chris Dagdigian]

With that philosophy of yours maybe you'd be better off running an 
unlisted bridge ("bridge relay") ? Those seem aimed squarely at helping 
people evade government censorship and national firewalls. May be more 
close to the type of service you'd like to be providing ?



> Josef 'veloc1ty' Stautner <mailto:hello at veloc1ty.de>
> January 16, 2015 at 3:40 PM
> Hello List,
>
> I first heard from TOR after the leaks of snowden and started to read a
> lot about TOR but never used it - and I still don't use it (I just don't
> have the need for it).
> Before christmas I started a tor relay on my dedicated server. To be
> clear: Just a normal middle relay with 100 MBit/s advertised and 200
> MBit/s burst. While the holidays more and more traffic was going over
> the network card.
>
> After a week I decided to increase the speed to 200 MBit/s advertised
> bandwidth.
> A day later I took the reduced exit rules and kicked out some more
> ports. So now I'm running an exit relay.
>
> The past days I made some short tcpdump traces to find out what people
> use TOR for. Well, it's kind of sad. A short analyse of the hostnames
> gave me the result: 80% Porn, 10% site crawling, 5% Wordpress comment
> spam and 5% "human" traffic.
> I don't get why people use TOR for watching porn.
>
> Now I dived deeper into the TOR architecture. I read that now that I'm
> running an exit relay I'm not able to be a normal middle relay (please
> tell me if I'm wrong).
>
> Since I'm not willing to help people with my exit relay just to watch
> anonymous porn on the web, I would rather help the people inside the
> network stay anonymous and speedup the network itself - thus just
> running a normal relay. I'm aware that the porn traffic will still be
> running through the relay but also the "better"/wanted relay-to-relay
> traffic.
>
> Long story short: What type of relay helps the TOR project more?
> Exit-Relay or Middle-relay? Is it really the "job" from TOR to provide
> an exit to the normal internet ressources or should the focus be on
> hidden services?
>
> Thanks in advance for your comments/suggestions,
>
> Josef
>
> P.S.: I'm posting this to the normal tor-talk Mailinglist because I want
> to catch the opinion from the community and don't have a probleme with
> the relay software itself.
>