Re: Finding Volunteers - Hardly likely!!!!

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Oct 01, 2005 at 12:36:14AM -0400, Roadburner wrote:
>   Then I found out my IP was blacklisted or whatever that means because
>   someone misused the service.

Is this the SORBS blacklist, or which?

There are many email blacklists out there. Some of them are reasonable,
and some as you say are in it for the power trip and/or the extortion
money.

I spoke at length with Mat (the SORBS guy) to try to get him to see
reason, and he ultimately declared that his service was not about stopping
spam, it was about blacklisting everything that Mat doesn't like on the
Internet. And he doesn't like anonymity. At that point I figured the
conversation was over. He actively blacklists Tor IPs whether they have
done anything wrong or not.

I guess the answer is that you can't keep everybody happy at once. If
people choose to use SORBS, then they're putting themselves at the mercy
of Mat and his tactics. They lose.

(I feel sad that many people don't have the choice of whether their
ISP believes these blacklists -- but I suppose in a sense they do,
since they can vote with their feet.)

>   Then I was publicly criticized in APAS because I had a DHCP instead of
>   several static addresses, like one for Tor, and one for the re-mailer.
> 
>   Your instructions say a Dynamic address is fine. So why does Alex D Joode
>   criticize me? In public? I followed your instructions to the T!!!!

Tor does work with dynamic IP addresses. If you happen to have some
extras, it's probably a better set-up, but that's just up to personal
choice and circumstances.

As for what somebody told you on APAS -- last I checked APAS was mostly
just people yelling at each other and making fun of each other. If
you want to join the mixmaster community, that seems to be par for the
course. I'm doing my best to let the Tor community grow freely without
turning into another APAS. Hopefully there is slightly less yelling on
or-talk. :)

>   I thought it was a good thing, now I realize I was wrong. I will have to
>   encourage any potential volunteers to think twice. Apparently you must
>   have a couple of static IP addresses to partake.

You don't need static IPs, but some people will say bad things to you
if you don't. Come to think of it, people will probably say bad things
to you if you do, also.

Is Alex refusing mail from a bunch of mixmaster nodes because they're
on some blacklist he pays attention to? I think that's funny. It also
helps to explain some of the unreliability of Mixmaster message delivery.
I'm glad we chose to use a non-SMTP transport for Mixminion.

> At some point, it is not worth the effort.

That's true. We all need to decide about our priorities and which projects
are worth paying attention to and helping out. Tor is still very young,
and we've got a long way to go before all the wrinkles are ironed out.

> I now decline to participate. Public humiliation is not
>   worth it.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

--Roger