[tor-talk] Node Down and Old Version Notifications

[Kevin Gallagher]

Hello everyone,

The other day I got a really helpful e-mail. It seems a person named 
Paul wrote a program to check the PGP key servers and e-mail people to 
let them know that their keys are about to expire. After updating my key 
I thought about how an approach like this on the Tor consensus could be 
used to notify people when their Tor node goes down, or when their 
version of Tor is out of date and therefore their node becomes "not 
recommended."

Though such a tool might be useful, I wonder if it is in the spirit of 
Tor. I know that a lot of people obfuscate their e-mail when running a 
Tor node (using AT instead of @, etc.), and I'm sure part of the reason 
this is being done is because they don't want to be contacted by bots. 
However, maybe they would want to be notified if their node went down or 
was out of date.

Are there any thoughts on whether or not a tool like this is a good 
idea? If people think it's in the spirit of Tor I'm willing to sit down 
and try to write it up.

Thanks,

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Gallagher
Ph.D. Candidate
Center For Cybersecurity
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Key Fingerprint: D02B 25CB 0F7D E276 06C3  BF08 53E4 C50F 8247 4861