Re: TOR Server Idea

["Jeffrey F. Bloss" <jbloss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday 25 September 2005 01:26 am, ADB wrote:
> That wouldn't really work at all because Tor is a client as well as a
> server, remember? All client PCs would have to have tor client available

Tor can be configured to accept connections from machines other than the box 
it's running on. One could also set up another "central" proxy, like Privoxy, 
to accept outside connections and pipe them through tor. It's easy to do what 
the OP suggests with a couple entries in your torrc file, and a bit of 
configuring on each workstation.

> locally anyway, so it's actually best to have them all running
> separately. More entropy that way.

I'd say almost exactly the opposite. As each individual copy of tor would 
build its own circuit, an observer would at least be able to know how many 
machines were on a network, and how active each machine was. If you fed all 
connections through a single copy of tor it would tend to hide not only 
content and destination, but anything that might partition individual users. 
In some ways I'd say it's the preferable way to use tor.

There may be some drawbacks like running up against bandwidth throttling when 
multiple connections are flowing down the same pipe though...?? You'd have to 
play with it and see how each setup worked.

-- 
Hand crafted on September 25, 2005 at 09:02:19 -0400

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.
                                  -Groucho Marx