Re: [tor-relays] new relays

[grarpamp <grarpamp@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/31/13, tor@xxxxxxx <tor@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> This thread did go goofy and bad (and off-topic, given the subject in
> the emails). It seems clear that there are important reasons Tor could
> never begin examining/taking direct responsibility for/filtering the
> content that flows through it (as opposed with disallowing specific
> ports, which is different). Asking for this seems naive.

Censoring leads in the long term to balkanization of the net,
and is against open end to end principles and humanity.
So Tor itself will never have that facility. Exit operators are
themselves a separate thing from Tor though.

My note about extended exit flags was possible, yet for humour.
But also note that the current exitpolicy reject ip:port can be a
censorship / filtering tool just the same today. eg: look up the ip for
playboy.com and exitpolicy reject it. It's effect is silent but nasty,
growing into a useless balkanic state if enough exits do it. It doesn't
have quite the same usage/subscription inflection as "noporn" would.
And the third method, unannounced postfiltering, causes users
to notice it through disruption of expected content / packets.
So say someone rejected the ip of every library in their country?
Effective censorship on up to the number of exits that do it.
Unless of course Tor excluded exits with such long reject lists as being
unplausibly ridiculous and unnecessary donations of service to Tor,
ie: "we don't believe you're actually fielding requests from all those sites
to keep malicious users of your relay off of those sites".
I don't know if Tor has such an exclusion threshold to the consensus
yet but it probably should in order to discourage exits from engaging
in such quiet creeping censorship. Or some human could automate
review of all the relay policies and badexit those needless outliers.
Hopefully there never comes a day where there are not enough open
exits to serve duty. Till then this is actually moot, but worth recognizing.
_______________________________________________
tor-relays mailing list
tor-relays@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays