[Dclug] DCLUG meeting: Wed May 19: TOR: onion routing for privacy

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Aug 4, 2010 at 4:02 PM, james dasinger <jdasinger at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On a related note, I went over to check out HacDC the other day and
> broached the subject of setting up a Tor node out of their server. He
> said "Fine, just don't run an exit node." For some reason I thought
> that was kind of funny in light of the Dr's talk and recent news
> events. It seems people are pretty gun-shy about exit nodes.

This is because ISPs are pretty gun happy about shutting off customers
that generate DMCA complaints.
(Even though nothing requires them to be, ... but reading email costs
them money, I guess).

I know people who ran exits for years without any problem until the
torrent users started connecting to trackers via tor... then the
automated messages quickly got them disconnected when years of god
knows what wasn't a problem. :(

It's possible to run a tor exit with a limited exit policy that is
unlikely to generate complaints. E.g. I run a node that exits to
Wikipedia (which is read-only for Tor users) and some public DNS
servers. (And I'm trying to expand that list of "safe destinations"
over time... considering starting up a website so that people can
collaborate on maintaining such a list).

If some DC-area folks are interested in running a fast/full tor exit
perhaps we could pool resources and contacts and collectivity get one
running on a SWIPed address block with thick-skinned upstream ISPs.
I'd be game for contributing to such an effort.