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

[andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

On Sat, Aug 06, 2011 at 10:09:22PM +0200, lists@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote 1.0K bytes in 27 lines about:
: Could a Tor Exit Node pay itself and eventually generate more revenue to
: install other tor server by being self-supported by advertising?
: A Tor Exit Node could modify all the advertising that the user see while
: web browsing (google adwords, facebook, doubleclick, etc) by injecting
: it's own sponsored AD in http flow.

This has been done in the past, it didn't go well. Advertising networks
eventually kicked the person off their networks because 'anonymous
clicks' weren't valuable to them. If they don't tie your identity and
your click traffic together, the data isn't worth anything to them. 

http://www.torfox.org/ used to be a custom Tor browser that integrated
torbutton into the firefox codebase. See
http://web.archive.org/web/20090628072441/http://torfox.org/ for that
history.  It also included a configuration that forced you through the
torfox exit relays, which conveniently used javascript to automatically
click on ads that you the human never saw.

The torfox exit relays were unpublished relays and hardcoded into the
torfox browser.

In a conversation with mister torfox himself via a .onion forum, he
claimed to be making $350,000 a year this way. It was later revealed the
$350,000 was the sum of all their ad network hacking, not just torfox.
And it all went away when the ad networks disabled his accounts for
click fraud. 

-- 
Andrew
pgp key: 0x74ED336B
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