Re: [tor-relays] Exit in Turkey blocking torproject (komm EA93C), BadExit, Node Subscription Services, Censorship

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 3:25 PM grarpamp <grarpamp@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This particular case receiving mentions for at least a few months...
D1E99DE1E29E05D79F0EF9E083D18229867EA93C kommissarov 185.125.33.114

The relay won't [likely] be badexited because neither it nor its upstream is
shown to be doing anything malicious. Simple censorship isn't enough.
And except for such limited censorship, the nodes are otherwise fully
useful, and provide a valuable presence inside such regions / networks.

Users, in such censoring regimes, that have sucessfully connected
to tor, already have free choice of whatever exits they wish, therefore
such censorship is moot for them.

For everyone else, and them, workarounds exist such as,,,
https://onion.torproject.org/
http://yz7lpwfhhzcdyc5y.onion/
search engines, sigs, vpns, mirrors, etc

Further, whatever gets added to static exitpolicy's might move out
from underneath them or the censor, the censor may quit, or the exit
may fail to maintain the exitpolicy's. None of which are true representation
of the net, and are effectively censorship as result of operator action
even though unintentional / delayed.

Currently many regimes do limited censorship like this,
so you'd lose all those exits too for no good reason, see...
https://ooni.torproject.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country

And arbitrarily hamper spirits, tactics, and success of volunteer
resistance communities and operators in, and fighting, such regimes
around the world.

And if the net goes chaotic, majority of exits will have limited visibility,
for which exitpolicy / badexit are hardly manageable solutions either,
and would end up footshooting out many partly useful yet needed
exits as well.

If this situation bothers users, they can use... SIGNAL NEWNYM,
New Identity, or ExcludeExitNodes.

They can also create, maintain and publish lists of whatever such
classes of nodes they wish to determine, including various levels
of trust, contactability, verification, ouija, etc... such that others
can subscribe to them and Exclude at will.
They can further publish patches to make tor automatically
read such lists, including some modes that might narrowly exclude
and route stream requests around just those lists of censored
destination:exit pairings.

Ref also...
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS197328%20flag:exit
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:tr%20flag:exit

In the subect situations, you'd want to show that it is in fact
the exit itself, not its upstream, that is doing the censorship.

Or that if fault can't be determined to the upstream or exit, what
would be the plausible malicious benefit for an exit / upstream
to block a given destination such that a badexit is warranted...

a) Frustrate and divert off 0.001% of Turk users smart enough to
use tor, chancing through tor client random exit selection of your
blocking exit, off to one of the workarounds that you're equally
unlikely to control and have ranked, through your exit vs one
of the others tor has open?

b) Prop up weird or otherwise secretly bad nodes on the net,
like the hundreds of other ones out there, for which no badexit
or diverse subscription services yet exist to qualify them?

c) ???

Or that some large number of topsites were censored via
singular or small numbers of exits / upstreams so as to be
exceedingly annoying to the network users as a whole, where
no other environment of such / chaotic widespread annoyance
is known to exist at the same time.
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