More GSoC Ideas

["Jonathan Addington" <madjon@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am *not* vying for a spot (I doubt I would make it) but here are a
couple of ideas and reasons for them.

1. Enable tor to use a blacklist of some sort, perhaps with
categories, at the tor operator's choice. (Perhaps using Squid in a
non-caching mode) Examples:
  A. I had at least one connection to legal-preteen.com. I am willing
to take some chances of getting into trouble with the law for the sake
of avoiding internet censoship, but not to that end. Child pornography
and The Great Firewall of China are two completely separate things.
  B. I've had to block Google because my roomates were getting the
nasty "this might be spyware" page and weren't all too happy about
that.
  C. I've blocked The Pirate Bay, and when I have time, will block
other such sites. (See idea 2). If operators want to let tor users go
through to those sites that's fine, I don't even care all that much
except that I think the limited tor bandwidth can go to better uses.

2. On *nix systems, make it easy for snort to filter out tor traffic
on a protocol level. I realize there are plenty of legal uses for
BitTorrent, Gnutella, etc., but most of them do not require anonymity
in a strong sense. That is, they can get the same content through http
(most of the time) anyway, and downloading a Linux distribution (or
whatever) won't be flagged by most governments/agencies/whatever. It's
my bandwidth, I have the right to let *others'* use it as I see fit.

Moreover, if these were implemented I would be much more comfortable
setting up additional tor nodes at friends' houses, or my parents',
who have high-speed connections. However, the last thing my parents
need is the FBI knocking on their door wondering why they are visiting
legal-preteen.com. I don't think that would make them very happy.
(Granted, I could just set tor up as a non-exit node, which I may do,
but the tor network could use more exit nodes in general.)

Just ideas,

-madjon

-- 
madjon@xxxxxxxxx