Re: [tor-talk] Hijacking Advertising to give a Tor Exit node economic sustainability?

["Fabio Pietrosanti (naif)" <lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Well,

the advertising could be provided in several way:

a) Charity based advertisement
   Replace most ADV (facebook, google, linkedin, tom, baidu, etc) with
boxes inviting the user to provide donation tor Tor Project, Eff or to a
specific Tor Servers project (such as torservers.net).

b) Automatic Tor Servers network billing/management
   An interesting way would be to ask for donation trough paypal and
other electronic payment systems with the 'fees' going directly into an
account that is used to pay for Tor Servers.
   An automatic system would also be able to 'setup' new Tor Servers if
there is enough credit, or to shutdown Tor Servers if the monthly credit
is not enough.
   That way a proportional increase of Tor Traffic would allow automatic
setup of new Tor Servers, while a reduction of traffic would reduce the
number of Tor Servers (for example using Amazon EC2 or RackSpace Cloud
servers)

c) Referral based advertisement
   Replace most ADV (facebook, google, linkedin, tom, baidu, etc)) with
promotion to buy goods and services related to Privacy and/or Freedom of
speech (Amazon's books, Disk encryption software, PC/Mac/Mobile Security
Suite).


Such approaches could avoid:
- The effort to 'recruit' publisher like Anchror Free is doing
- The problem of unique IP addresses of Tor Exit Nodes (that would
appear like a fraud to most)
- The problem of user profiling (the ADV would not be based on
User-Content-Behaviour, so it would not be a privacy invasion)

The hijacking could be done on the basis of DNS without parsing web
content. Tor has a DNS cache of 5 minutes, it could be lowered to manage
specifically that requests.

However it would be much more efficient is it would be done at least by
looking at the Language of the user, to serve ADV in the right user
language.

On my tor exit node node i would like to reduce the Tor DNS cache from 5
minutes to 5 seconds and log all DNS requests to do proper ADV
capability profiling:

- Given sample of 100GB of Tor Exit Traffic how many ADV could be served
(by hijacking ADV providing url) ?

With such answer it would be possible at least to understand the
economical feasibility of it.

-naif

On 8/7/11 4:08 AM, Collin Anderson wrote:
> For whatever it's worth, this seems to be a common model for a number of
> free VPN and Glype-style Web-based providers, who cater to clients
> attempting to get around content filtering. I've been interested in the
> mechanics and economics of the approach, but haven't yet had time to do
> any investigation.
> 
> *CDA*
_______________________________________________
tor-talk mailing list
tor-talk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk