Re: [tor-talk] What relay does really help the TOR project?

[Thomas White <thomaswhite@xxxxxxxxxx>]

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One more point to note, please do not log or try to search for what
users are using your exit for. I run a lot of exits myself and I know
when starting out you can get curious, but it is a slippery road. If
you keep logs on the exit server of user activity, that will
demonstrate to the law a heightened responsibility for whatever occurs
on the server as it shows a monitoring system is in place. Not to
mention they could make an order to hand the logs over.

As a tldr, using Tor for porn is pretty normal for some parts of the
world, and I don't just mean in countries with dictator regimes. I
have spoken to somebody is still very much "in the closet" gay as he
is worried about his family finding out due to their religious beliefs
on such matters. That guy is in the US. It is the same for any use of
Tor really, there will be some who abuse it and many who would use it
for what we might see as non-interesting, but never underestimate the
power and influence of Tor. It has real world effects, people are
putting their lives on the line by leaking secrets, exposing
corruption, or even just for asking a question. My belief is firmly
that everyone has the right of free expression and to read uninhibited
by taboo or whatever laws might be in their country. That is a very
powerful statement and remember every time you run a relay, you are
helping those people stay safe. You may never meet them, but I have
met a few and I can assure you, they cannot express their gratitude
enough.

Finally, if you want to help improve Tor in other ways, use Tor. For
example, ioerror made a great addon for Mozilla Thunderbird called
TorBirdy which ensures all email traffic is routed through Tor.
Anonymity loves company so by using the Tor network you are not only
giving yourself a greater degree of privacy online, but helping those
who depend on Tor with their lives at stake.

T

Josef 'veloc1ty' Stautner:
> 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.
> 
> 
> 

- -- 
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