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.