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

[Tom van der Woerdt]

Hi Josef,

Exit nodes provide most value to the network, as they will also be able 
to handle entry and middle traffic.

As for porn: maybe the wiki page on porn legality [1] explains it. Also 
note that this kind of traffic helps to mask other kinds of Tor traffic, 
essentially helping the network (not to mention the popularity gain). 
Oh, and don't forget that the "normal" internet also has quite a high 
share of this kind of traffic.

Tom



[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_by_region


Josef 'veloc1ty' Stautner schreef op 16/01/15 om 21:40:
> 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.
>
>
>