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Re: ATTN: for-profit Tor operators



On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, Eugen Leitl wrote:

Personally, I like the alternate side of this service -- the access to hidden tor services.

With recent legal developments in the US, some very interesting sites -- even those which are text-ONLY have gone away. The draw of being able to offer existing threatened sites an alternative is a good thing (along with careful auditing and accounting of said sites to make sure no obvious clues as to the actual server location are left).

It could make paid-tor access very feasible, indeed.

For example, a tor-ized mirror of a "fetish stories" site, if the mirroring was automatic, might be stupid and mirror the thing from its own public IP (thus giving its location away), instead of more properly mirroring the site THROUGH tor (or some other anonymous proxy service).

I love tor, personally, but I'm daunted by the number of pieces of software I've had to set up to get it to work. I *really* think the necessary element here that stops things is the lack of a single-shot installer.



On Wed, Nov 23, 2005 at 03:21:29PM -0600, Paul Andrew de La Soujeole wrote:

I am definitely interested. I have a 10Mb/s server in Florida which is
currently running Tor. How would users be charged? Would they be rate

How you would charge your users is entirely at discretion of the individual operators. I suggest some low-friction payment scheme (PayPal, IBAN bank transfers for EU users) to reduce entry threshold, but for the truly tin-hatted acceptance of anonymous payment schemes (cash, e-gold & Co) are almost mandatory, even if almost nobody will make use of it.

limited and charged per Mb/s, per GB/month, or by using a 95th percentile

For starters, I would limit the service to web browsing and assume a flat fee (say, 5$/month subscription for basic anonymous browsing via Tor/privoxy). This can be abused, but this requires some malignancy on part of the users. Given that the first leg is encrypted but authenticated it's fundamentally feasible to charge individual users for traffic by the GByte.

scheme? I think this has some real potential.

Paranoia and willigness to rely on anonymization services provided by a commercial entity (and subsequent tradeoff in accountability) are somewhat mutually exclusive. We'll see whether the market will accept it.



--

"Of course she's gonna be upset! You're dealing with a woman here Dan, what the hell's wrong with you?"

-S. Kennedy, 11/11/01

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
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