Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcherm | Hacker News Reader

I don't wish to deal with the headaches involved in running a Tor exit node (despite this article's claim that the headaches are less than one might expect). I wonder if there is a way to contribute money to help those who ARE willing to invest the effort to run these nodes?

View on HN

Yes: a number of non-profits exist, who operate high-bandwidth Tor exit nodes. In Europe and North America, many of them partnered with the German TorServers.net: https://www.torservers.net/partners.html

There are several reasons one might want to setup a non-profit for this: - we can pool resources (money, but also technical expertise, availability to reply to abuse mails, access to legal expertise ...); - it gives you greater (but still not great) media visibility for advocacy/outreach and running donation campaigns; - it puts you on better footing if/when contacted by law enforcement agencies; - it makes it easier to find networks that aren't heavily represented in the Tor network yet, and are willing to host exit nodes.

Full disclaimer: I am on the board of directors and sysadmin team of Nos oignons [NO], a French non-profit that operates Tor exit nodes.

[NO]: https://nos-oignons.net

I would like to contact you.

For IM: http://nicolas.braud-santoni.eu/otr.asc

For email: https://sks-keyservers.net/pks/lookup?op=vindex&fingerprint=...

You could just buy a vps and install tor there. I imagine it wouldn't take 30 minutes to set it up for life. For very low costs too, a 1tb of traffic goes for about 5$ with some memory and 1 core.

You'd have to be very wary about where you do that though, most VPS hosts don't mind relays but don't allow exit nodes, some allow both and some allow neither.

Speaking from experience, DigitalOcean and Vultr seem to be cool with relays.

Careful with cloud hosting which don't offer unlimited bandwidth. Although DO doesn't really charge for bandwidth (right now) it can at any moment it choses.

Ideally you don't host with the big guys (since there are so many relays already - diversity) which makes it a bit harder to find something. Ten times so for exits.

Also, occasional upgrades.

It should only take a few minutes to set it up. I made an online configurator which installs everything for you. https://tor-relay.co/ </shameless plug>

Like some other comments, you can find people who run tor relays and accept donations (TorServers being my personal choice), however, very few are willing to run exit nodes.

torservers seems to be doing exit node.

They indeed are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com