why is the traffic not more linear?
Hi! Why is the traffic throughput of my tor node not more linear? Why is it jumping so much? http://torstatus.blutmagie.de/router_detail.php?FP=bb78369c1bee82a4ef391bc183a91ff552913c5c significant parts of my torrc: RelayBandwidthRate 100 KBytes # Throttle traffic to 100KB/s (800Kbps) RelayBandwidthBurst 200 KBytes # But allow bursts up to 200KB/s (1600Kbps) AccountingStart day 00:00 AccountingMax 10 GB Why the traffic isn't linear at almost 100kb? Thanx for your help! -- Michael Gomboc pgp-id: 0x5D41FDF8
Re: Tor Exit Node Sponsorship - looking for partners
Hi, I was asked by mail if I was interested in $5 a month. To make that one clear: Yes, I am! I want to fund a node. Depending on the number of people, amounts of money, wishes for services, I will try to find the best suitable hoster. The three posted were just examples of what I have in mind. Just contact me, I'll add you to the list, and keep you posted. When speaking in terms of bandwidth, e.g. 150Mbps, then I'd rather spread it across n machines with 150Mbps/n each. I understand that it is far from ideal. Still, one has to be practical. Currently, one machine is responsible for 25% of exit traffic. Of course, a large number of smaller nodes with good (unrestricted) exit policy would be best, but why don't we have them already then ..? Apart from Mike Perrys arguments, I'd like you to see me as an ISP, offering independent VPS for Tor hosting, with an additional Tor friendly abuse handling. All I can do is promise (and put it in the contract) that I will not monitor the traffic. Then you're better off than with most ISPs out there that shut you down for running Tor or even demand 200 Euro for forwarding one abuse message. If I was the first ISP to offer small VPS, preconfigured Tor exit nodes with root access for customization, then it's a small step towards saying that at the same time, I can put all efforts into one bigger node instead. I mean, what is better, one ISP that explicitly allows Tor, handles abuse, and encrypts the drives, or an ISP that shuts down your virtual server the first time it gets a complaint and maybe monitors your traffic? Strato, the second largest hoster in Europe, once called the police on one of their dedicated servers, because they suspected criminal behavior, by watching the traffic - on their own initiative. I can never make sure that the traffic isn't logged upstream. Also, most ISPs offering VPS are not very explicit about the configuration of their virtual machines, you have to try and see if Tor works first. I will make sure that it does. If you look at bandwidth and hardware prices, once you rent servers, additional bandwidth is cheap. Example: At FDCServers, you get a dedicated machine with 10mbit/s for $50, 100mbit/s (and better hardware) for $160, and 1000mbit/s for $500. I don't aim for the Gigabit, but 10mbit/s is just not economically worthwhile. Kickstarter has three disadvantages: [...] Indeed. I am neither US citizen, nor do I plan to (only) accept Amazon Payments. I see PayPal as one alternative, yes, but in the end it depends on where the people who would like to fund a node live. I am German, EU payments can be made without any fees to my bank account. For organizing payments, I am currently looking into billing software, but haven't been able to find something that suits my needs. I don't have a problem organizing monthly mass email for 20 people (please, pay your fee, by your payment processor of choice among the following...). I would also like theoretically to accept anonymous donations for a node (not for the VPN/webspace stuff of course), but the problem there is not so much accepting it (PSC, Ukash, Liberty Reserve etc), but making sure that the money comes in regularly to fund the node. Before working on the details, I want to make sure there is actual interest in such a node. You have to open to a world of people who see the good in Tor, but either don't have the time or the knowledge to run an own exit. -- Moritz Bartl GPG 0xED2E9B44 http://moblog.wiredwings.com/ *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: Tor Problems on Korean Windows
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 6:31 PM, Kees keesv...@gmail.com wrote: I recently installed tor on the windows machine of a Korean friend and it did not want to work. After a lot of messing about we worked out the the problem was his Korean user name in the path to the torrc file. Once we moved the torrc file to c:\program files\vidalia\tor and told vidalia we had done that, everything to started working. So it seems that either tor or vidalia chokes on unicode characters in the torrc path. I presume I should log this as a bug somewhere, but I am not entirely sure where. Hi! The bugtracker is at bugs.torproject.org. yrs, -- Nick *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: Tor Exit Node Sponsorship - looking for partners
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 6:20 PM, Moritz Bartl t...@wiredwings.com wrote: I would also like theoretically to accept anonymous donations for a node (not for the VPN/webspace stuff of course), but the problem there is not so much accepting it (PSC, Ukash, Liberty Reserve etc), but making sure that the money comes in regularly to fund the node. A thought: Currently there is a Donate! section on torproject.org, that doesn't mention what the money is used for or how much money that comes in. I think a lot more people would donate if they could see that the money went directly to fast tor relays. Why not do something similar, set up a pool that people can donate to, and put it up on torproject.org. (I can see the issues with advertising it on the website, but that's just a suggestion.) // pipe *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: Tor Exit Node Sponsorship - looking for partners
--- On Wed, 5/12/10, Anders Andersson pipat...@gmail.com wrote: A thought: Currently there is a Donate! section on torproject.org, that doesn't mention what the money is used for or how much money that comes in. I think a lot more people would donate if they could see that the money went directly to fast tor relays. Why not do something similar, set up a pool that people can donate to, and put it up on torproject.org. (I can see the issues with advertising it on the website, but that's just a suggestion.) Also, making donations possible from so sort of anonymous money system to directly support bandwidth might be an idea. -Martin *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: Tor Exit Node Sponsorship - looking for partners
A thought: Currently there is a Donate! section on torproject.org, that doesn't mention what the money is used for or how much money that comes in. If you look closely, at the bottom of the page a pie says what the money is used for. Basically, torproject donations are used for development. It might not even be too good to have the same people run nodes. I think it's important that development gets funded. The German Chaos Computer Club and the German Privacy foundation, to name only two, also accept donations towards running Tor nodes. I have something different in mind than just accepting donations for nodes. The node website could list its owners, with a small bio and why they are doing it. And like I said you can use parts of the machine for different purposes (VPN, Webserver, ...). Martin Fick: Also, making donations possible from so sort of anonymous money system to directly support bandwidth might be an idea. I first planned to offer a certain bandwidth push for one-time donations, eg. 1Mbit/s for one month for 2 Euro. The system could be automated to automatically update the Tor node configuration. Still, this doesn't solve the problem that there is no hoster that supports to buy small amounts of bandwidth for just one month. The only thing that comes pretty close are cloud hosters like Amazon, but the bandwidth and constant workload isn't very cheap. What I can offer of course is to collect donations, until they can be turned into a useful node. For example, anonymous/non-recurring donations could be distributed evenly amongst the recurring payers (node sponsors). For torproject.org , I suggest to accept UKash, PaysafeCard, Liberty Reserve and maybe another credit card processor (Paypal doesn't allow prepaid and virtual CCs) in addition to privacy-unfriendly Paypal. -- Moritz Bartl GPG 0xED2E9B44 http://moblog.wiredwings.com/ *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: messages indicate strange choice by tor
On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 10:02 AM, Scott Bennett benn...@cs.niu.edu wrote: I would be most interested in knowing the explanation for the decision that tor announced in the following pair of messages. Apr 14 08:55:50.861 [info] connection_or_group_set_badness(): Marking OR conn to 194.109.206.212:443 as too old for new circuits: (fd 7, 900 secs old). We have a better canonical one (fd 118; 2239 secs old). Apr 14 08:55:50.861 [info] run_connection_housekeeping(): Expiring non-used OR connection to fd 7 (194.109.206.212:443) [Too old]. Why is the younger connection too old, yet the much older connection is somehow better? Oops, just saw that nobody had answered this. That info message is a bit misleading; too old in the message should really be something more like unsuitable. For the full ugly details, check out connection_or_group_set_badness() and connection_or_is_better() in connection_or.c. Some reasons you might get that message is if the older connection is canonical and the new one isn't, or if the older one has circuits and the new one has gone 15 minutes but gotten no circuits. I'll fix that info message in 0.2.2.x. yrs, -- Nick *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Network Status Reports
I am just curious as to why of the known mirror's that show the network status reports, why there is such a discrepancy between blutmagie reports and the others? Is blutmagie using a different config in reporting than the others? It appears blutmagie numbers are a lot lower than the other mirror reports as far as I can tell. Jon *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: Tor Exit Node Sponsorship - looking for partners
On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 07:11:53PM +0200, t...@wiredwings.com wrote 2.0K bytes in 45 lines about: : A thought: Currently there is a Donate! section on torproject.org, : that doesn't mention what the money is used for or how much money that : comes in. : : If you look closely, at the bottom of the page a pie says what the money : is used for. For this specific topic, it is here: https://www.torproject.org/donate#outcome In general, all US non-profits have to file a Form 990 with the IRS annually. It is a public document that lays out who funds the non-profit and how much, where the funds went, and a categorization of how the funds were spent. Everyone considering donating to a US non-profit should find the 990 and evaluate their performance for yourself. There are other non-profits who make up metrics and rate non-profits on these made-up metrics. YMMV. : important that development gets funded. The German Chaos Computer Club : and the German Privacy foundation, to name only two, also accept : donations towards running Tor nodes. Yes. The CCC has a bank account just for donations for their Tor activities. The banking info for the CCC will return to our donation webpage shortly. As for the question, why can't Tor do this already? We've been told repeatedly and by very smart lawyers, do not host relays in the name of the non-profit Tor Project, Inc. An oversimplification of the advice is that we can spend our money on making more scalable, better performing, and more anonymous Tor, or spend our money fighting lawsuits from anyone claiming the non-profit is responsible for the traffic it transmits. We produce code, not legal statements of defense. We're always open to legal advice to the contrary. This FAQ is still valid, https://www.torproject.org/eff/tor-legal-faq.html.en. As for a 3rd party hosting fast exit nodes, great. Tor needs more relays to scale. The network is already overloaded and we're sustaining around 500,000 daily users out of roughly 30 million downloads in the last 12 calendar months. Tor is slow, this is not news to anyone. What is news is that there is such a demand for online anonymity and privacy half a million people are willing to take the slowness to protect themselves. I2P and FreeNet are also seeing growth over the past year or two as well. As the saying goes, All ships rise with the tide. The topic of an exchange or marketplace to match those with money to those with technical skill in running relays is not new. It's been an internal debate for the past year or two. Incentives can have unforseen consequences, see https://blog.torproject.org/blog/two-incentive-designs-tor for lots of details. This legal environments change dramatically from country to country. Right now, the US is probably the best place to run an exit node, given tor has common carrier like status according to the aforementioned smart lawyers. Internally, we decided we aren't economists and would probably suck at running such an exchange. This doesn't mean you cannot try. Coldboot in the UK is also trying something similar. The more the merrier. I've had casual conversations with some global ISPs about running their own Tor networks as a value-added service to customers wishing to escape the defacto Internet surveillance that exists today. Not one has started such a thing to my knowledge. My suggestion for those considering doing something like Kickstart is to do a year at a time. It's easier to raise $2400 to fund a fast exit node at someplace like 100tb.com for a year than it will be to raise $200/mo for 12 months. Buy the server for a year and post a copy of the receipt somewhere. People will check throughout the year to see the server is still online. If not, figure out some refund plan pro-rated to months left in the contract if the server lasts less than a year. Maybe some other non-profit could offer to be a fiscal sponsor so the donations are tax-deductible. My USD $0.02. -- Andrew Lewman The Tor Project pgp 0x31B0974B Website: https://www.torproject.org/ Blog: https://blog.torproject.org/ Identi.ca: torproject *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: GeoIP database comparison
Wasn't there a user driven opensource geoip database project somewhere? Sortof like DynDNS, users go to the website, it pops up their ip address, they enter their location in the DB. Thought it had some advanced stuff too, network admins could enter CIDR blocks, contact info and such. *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
Re: Running a stable exit node without interference (Was blutmagie quad core upgrade)
I Don't have any information about the subject but would it be possible to buy own ip-range which would stay in my possession even if I switched ISP's. I don't think it comes very cheap... I have been thinking a long time how to run a stable exit node without getting constantly in trouble. Your own Whois-data on your ip-range (abuse-contact etc) could help a lot. This is all possible, and in fact, largely required. However, contrary to the requirement, many providers do not allow their customers to do this. https://www.arin.net/resources/request/reassignments.html If you poke around whois using IP address from small hosting companies you'll find a few examples of properly swipped delegations. Say a /16 farming out a /22 to the hoster. You can buy your own CIDR blocks straight from the RIR's just like any ISP can. But it's not cheap, and you are pretty much required to be well steeped in the tech and also already in business as a sizable ISP/hoster. *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
