Re: ATTN: for-profit Tor operators

["Glymr Darkmoon" <glymr_darkmoon@xxxxxxx>]

i have a better idea

what about a non-profit organisation?

how exactly would you guarantee anonymity if people have to pay. paying
on the internet mostly means giving away your identity.

if it were not a subscription service, donations could not be implied as
collusion, the receivers of the donations could not be sure whether the
donations were purely philanthropic or not.

the whole point of tor is that you cast your lot in with a larger group
of people and isolating one from the other becomes harder and harder the
more there is.

money is definitely needed to fund the nodes, my estimate is that a
basic minimum 20kb/s node would cost around us$800 a year to run. but in
the us of course this cost is lower due to the rather absurdly low
(compared to the rest of the world) cost of bandwidth.

i feel it would be more useful to talk to the EFF about setting up a
fund specifically for running tor nodes, and through this fund server
operators can be reimbursed for their expenses given their compliance
with a set of minimums (like you suggest, 10mbit connections) or perhaps
a sliding scale. this would encourage server operators to participate in
the fund raising system. a simple example of raising funds would be such
things as selling t-shirts (every open source project does this, why not
tor), and other value-added things, even just a donation system to help
fund a router in your country or a specified country.

the architecture and goals of tor do not truck with mercantile
principles. we do need more servers, and isolating a new network from
the old network in actual fact greatly diminishes the benefit of the new
nodes.


glymr
-- 
  Glymr Darkmoon
  glymr_darkmoon@xxxxxxx

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