Re: [RFC] Campaign »Buy/Sponsor a relay.«
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:41:00 -0500 Andrew Lewman and...@torproject.org wrote: On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:26:00 +0100, Paul Menzel paulepan...@users.sourceforge.net wrote: :on the Tor start page [1] there is a message »Help us reach 5,000 : relays in 2010!« :»I guess for people caring about privacy but not wanting/able to set up :a server themselves can now be told, you can pay 90 pounds a month [for :10 Mbps] and you will improve the connectivity of the Tor network.« [me :on IRC] We turn down funding when organizations ask us to run relays on their behalf. They have the money, but not the technical skills to run relays. The risk to The Tor Project, the non-profit entity, is that we become a target as we could potentially see a large percentage of Tor network traffic. This traffic becomes interesting to law enforcement, criminal organizations, marketers, and others wanting to enumerate Tor users. This same concern is true for the funding organization. A human rights organization wanted to run either hundreds of relays or to see their relay names as the top 10 relays in the Vidalia network map for a year. They almost looked at the network map/relay list as a branding opportunity. However, controlling relays with that much traffic, even if the relays are dispersed around the world, would turn them into a data collection target. I encourage a peer to peer model of getting more relays. Having individuals run a relay and contribute the bandwidth that makes sense seems to be a less risky model. As the risk is spread out amongst hundreds or thousands of individuals. This is a more difficult path than turning lots of money into relays. Ultimately, I believe this path is more sustainable in the long-term. As committed relay operators run them for their own reasons, not for a paycheck. Active areas of research are around everyone as a bridge and everyone as a relay if the tor client finds itself reachable by the outside world. Getting these options correct without screwing users is difficult. However, we are making progress. The everyone as a relay thing has been discussed here in the past ad nauseam and has ended up opposed every time for very good reasons. The everyone as a bridge idea ought to fail for the same reasons, but would have the additional complication of requiring that tor *not* run as a bridge if it is already running as a relay with a published descriptor. One possibility that I don't recall seeing discussed would be to have all *relays* provide directory service on internal circuits, even if no DirPort is open. I'm not at all sure that this would provide any noticeable improvement in the tor network's performance, but it might also be a fairly easy change to make. I would oppose, however, any attempt to require that clients provide directory or other services. In the meanwhile, we need more relays, in particular exit relays, to help speed up Tor for everyone. In the U.S., at least, that effort would be furthered, I think, by a publicity campaign identifying ISPs that provide *full* Internet access to residential accounts, as opposed to ISPs that provide only *partial* Internet access to residential accounts (e.g., Comcast). That would help to provide a marketing advantage to ISPs offering full service over ISPs that don't. It might also be worthwhile to start a complaint-to-the-FCC campaign to report misleading advertising by ISPs that offer only partial access but market it as Internet access as if it were full access. Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * ** * A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army. * *-- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * ** *** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talkin the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/
[RFC] Campaign »Buy/Sponsor a relay.«
Dear Tor folks, on the Tor start page [1] there is a message »Help us reach 5,000 relays in 2010!« On IRC arma discovered an offer by the British ISP Coldbot where you can buy 1 Mb/s bandwidth for £9 per month [2]. Although it is quite pricey I find the idea very nice. »I guess for people caring about privacy but not wanting/able to set up a server themselves can now be told, you can pay 90 pounds a month [for 10 Mbps] and you will improve the connectivity of the Tor network.« [me on IRC] I suggested to contact ISPs for special rates, but arma and Sebastian pointed out that only getting relays from one ISP would hurt Tor security-wise. So different ISPs world-wide should be contacted. So what do you think about this campaign? I guess the first question is, have you ever been in this kind of situation where people asked you on how to support the Tor project. The second question is, is donating [3] working out quite well, i. e. are a lot of people donating? Would a »Sponsor a relay.« campaign hurt these fund raising efforts? Thanks, Paul [1] http://www.torproject.org/ [2] http://coldbot.com/price/tor [3] http://www.torproject.org/donate signature.asc Description: Dies ist ein digital signierter Nachrichtenteil
Re: [RFC] Campaign »Buy/Sponsor a relay.«
On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:26:00 +0100, Paul Menzel paulepan...@users.sourceforge.net wrote: :on the Tor start page [1] there is a message »Help us reach 5,000 : relays in 2010!« :»I guess for people caring about privacy but not wanting/able to set up :a server themselves can now be told, you can pay 90 pounds a month [for :10 Mbps] and you will improve the connectivity of the Tor network.« [me :on IRC] We turn down funding when organizations ask us to run relays on their behalf. They have the money, but not the technical skills to run relays. The risk to The Tor Project, the non-profit entity, is that we become a target as we could potentially see a large percentage of Tor network traffic. This traffic becomes interesting to law enforcement, criminal organizations, marketers, and others wanting to enumerate Tor users. This same concern is true for the funding organization. A human rights organization wanted to run either hundreds of relays or to see their relay names as the top 10 relays in the Vidalia network map for a year. They almost looked at the network map/relay list as a branding opportunity. However, controlling relays with that much traffic, even if the relays are dispersed around the world, would turn them into a data collection target. I encourage a peer to peer model of getting more relays. Having individuals run a relay and contribute the bandwidth that makes sense seems to be a less risky model. As the risk is spread out amongst hundreds or thousands of individuals. This is a more difficult path than turning lots of money into relays. Ultimately, I believe this path is more sustainable in the long-term. As committed relay operators run them for their own reasons, not for a paycheck. Active areas of research are around everyone as a bridge and everyone as a relay if the tor client finds itself reachable by the outside world. Getting these options correct without screwing users is difficult. However, we are making progress. In the meanwhile, we need more relays, in particular exit relays, to help speed up Tor for everyone. -- 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: [RFC] Campaign »Buy/Sponsor a relay.«
Hello peoples, For my part i am on searching where rent a server for a nicely price to can make again stats on a exit for helping Tor. So any interessant propositions are welcome. As i will offer a constant stats for Karsten and offer a clean exit who are always good to have. Any propostions welcome Best regards SwissTorExit signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: [RFC] Campaign »Buy/Sponsor a relay.«
While I understand your concern I disagree since we're already in this boat. I'm currently running a relay with Comcast as my ISP, and if I was going to run an exit I'd go back to the past list correspondence about low-hassle (tor friendly) hosting solutions. In both cases my ISP or hosting provider are seeing the traffic of hundreds of tor relays. They're the points of potential mass data aggregation we should be concerned about for this sort of large scale eavesdropping, not necessarily the relay's operators. Hence, as long as any hosting entity properly set the 'Family' parameter, I think we should welcome this sort of hired-relay-operation. The proper countermeasure for this problem (imho) would be to grant relays an implied family based on geoip data and known ISP/hoster ip ranges (ie, don't make my circuit through multiple relays hosted by Comcast or, say, in the US). Just my two cents... cheers! -Damian On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Andrew Lewman and...@torproject.orgwrote: On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:26:00 +0100, Paul Menzel paulepan...@users.sourceforge.net wrote: :on the Tor start page [1] there is a message »Help us reach 5,000 : relays in 2010!« :»I guess for people caring about privacy but not wanting/able to set up :a server themselves can now be told, you can pay 90 pounds a month [for :10 Mbps] and you will improve the connectivity of the Tor network.« [me :on IRC] We turn down funding when organizations ask us to run relays on their behalf. They have the money, but not the technical skills to run relays. The risk to The Tor Project, the non-profit entity, is that we become a target as we could potentially see a large percentage of Tor network traffic. This traffic becomes interesting to law enforcement, criminal organizations, marketers, and others wanting to enumerate Tor users. This same concern is true for the funding organization. A human rights organization wanted to run either hundreds of relays or to see their relay names as the top 10 relays in the Vidalia network map for a year. They almost looked at the network map/relay list as a branding opportunity. However, controlling relays with that much traffic, even if the relays are dispersed around the world, would turn them into a data collection target. I encourage a peer to peer model of getting more relays. Having individuals run a relay and contribute the bandwidth that makes sense seems to be a less risky model. As the risk is spread out amongst hundreds or thousands of individuals. This is a more difficult path than turning lots of money into relays. Ultimately, I believe this path is more sustainable in the long-term. As committed relay operators run them for their own reasons, not for a paycheck. Active areas of research are around everyone as a bridge and everyone as a relay if the tor client finds itself reachable by the outside world. Getting these options correct without screwing users is difficult. However, we are making progress. In the meanwhile, we need more relays, in particular exit relays, to help speed up Tor for everyone. -- 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: [RFC] Campaign »Buy/Sponsor a relay.«
StrangeCharm and I just had an interesting conversation about this. In short, while this suggestion would diversify trust it would also reduce the entropy of node selection. Not sure which is more important (I'd suspect the former, but could be argued). Cheers! -Damian (09:30:17 PM) StrangeCharm: hey (09:31:44 PM) Me: hey there (09:31:57 PM) StrangeCharm: i just read your or-talk posting (09:32:06 PM) Me: ah - thoughts? (09:32:46 PM) StrangeCharm: if we have a small number of really large families, don't the potential anonymity sets get much smaller? (09:33:29 PM) Me: we already have that situation (say, 500 with comcast, 300 with centurytell, 100 with dreamhost, etc) (09:34:09 PM) Me: if we're worried about relay operators as the point of failure then yes, big networks like this are bad (09:34:52 PM) StrangeCharm: you're suggesting that we already have these large 'families', over which end-to-end observation is possible, they're just not well marked? (09:34:57 PM) StrangeCharm: (and therefore evaded) (09:35:04 PM) Me: yup (09:35:55 PM) StrangeCharm: i see. (09:36:56 PM) StrangeCharm: i take it that you'd argue that we should protect against possible surveillance by known groups, whether or not we think it's occurring, even if it has some mild privacy deficits elsewhere? (09:38:10 PM) Me: don't follow what you mean by mild privacy defects - but yes, tor's designed to distribute trust (ie, that no one in the network can hurt you) and distributing the trust some more is a good thing (09:38:55 PM) StrangeCharm: well, if we recommend that nobody connects through multiple comcast nodes, the anonymits sets are smaller (09:41:04 PM) Me: Hmmm, I see what you mean - yea, you might have a point (though I think we're we're more interested in diversified trust than greater entropy of node selection). We'll see what the tor devs think. (09:41:30 PM) StrangeCharm: they tend to have good intuitions about these sorts of things (09:41:36 PM) Me: Mind if I post this conversation on the thread? It brings up a good point. (09:41:47 PM) StrangeCharm: go right ahead (09:41:49 PM) Me: thx On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Damian Johnson atag...@gmail.com wrote: While I understand your concern I disagree since we're already in this boat. I'm currently running a relay with Comcast as my ISP, and if I was going to run an exit I'd go back to the past list correspondence about low-hassle (tor friendly) hosting solutions. In both cases my ISP or hosting provider are seeing the traffic of hundreds of tor relays. They're the points of potential mass data aggregation we should be concerned about for this sort of large scale eavesdropping, not necessarily the relay's operators. Hence, as long as any hosting entity properly set the 'Family' parameter, I think we should welcome this sort of hired-relay-operation. The proper countermeasure for this problem (imho) would be to grant relays an implied family based on geoip data and known ISP/hoster ip ranges (ie, don't make my circuit through multiple relays hosted by Comcast or, say, in the US). Just my two cents... cheers! -Damian On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Andrew Lewman and...@torproject.orgwrote: On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 11:26:00 +0100, Paul Menzel paulepan...@users.sourceforge.net wrote: :on the Tor start page [1] there is a message »Help us reach 5,000 : relays in 2010!« :»I guess for people caring about privacy but not wanting/able to set up :a server themselves can now be told, you can pay 90 pounds a month [for :10 Mbps] and you will improve the connectivity of the Tor network.« [me :on IRC] We turn down funding when organizations ask us to run relays on their behalf. They have the money, but not the technical skills to run relays. The risk to The Tor Project, the non-profit entity, is that we become a target as we could potentially see a large percentage of Tor network traffic. This traffic becomes interesting to law enforcement, criminal organizations, marketers, and others wanting to enumerate Tor users. This same concern is true for the funding organization. A human rights organization wanted to run either hundreds of relays or to see their relay names as the top 10 relays in the Vidalia network map for a year. They almost looked at the network map/relay list as a branding opportunity. However, controlling relays with that much traffic, even if the relays are dispersed around the world, would turn them into a data collection target. I encourage a peer to peer model of getting more relays. Having individuals run a relay and contribute the bandwidth that makes sense seems to be a less risky model. As the risk is spread out amongst hundreds or thousands of individuals. This is a more difficult path than turning lots of money into relays. Ultimately, I believe this path is more sustainable in the long-term. As committed relay operators run them for their own reasons, not for a paycheck. Active areas of research are
