On Mon, Apr 30, 2007 at 09:53:27PM +0100, Mike Cardwell wrote: > Am I right in thinking that most people use Tor for web browsing, over > ports 80 and 443? And am I right in thinking that most of tors bandwidth > is used up by a minority of users, using services that require much > higher amounts of bandwidth, such as ptp traffic?
I think those are reasonable assumptions. A few people have done informal studies, and they found that the majority of _requests_ are for web browsing, and the majority of _bytes_ are for higher-bandwidth protocols. > If I am right, wouldn't the majority of the tor user base be better > served if a collection of exit nodes only exited port 80 and 443 > traffic? Does that have privacy implications? I initially thought > I should configure up my node to exit all traffic except for certain > ports, but after giving it more thought, it seemed the wider network > would be better off having more available http/https traffic. Could be. I don't think it will be as effective a solution as you hope, though -- more and more of the Internet is travelling over port 80 these days, due to firewall restrictions, filters, and people taking steps like the one you propose. :) It's not an arms race we can easily win, so I'm not that enthusiastic about starting it. --Roger
