> In addition to the reasons you mentioned, some people have had surprise 6am home visits from law enforcement for running exit nodes.
As someone who has had one of those surprise 6am home visits, I can attest to it being something you Do Not Want, especially from inexperienced British police officers who don't really understand what Tor is. To their credit they were incredibly professional about the whole thing, but it still resulted in every device in my home capable of storing data being seized, and six month's of social services asserting that I couldn't be alone with my then one year old son while those devices were inspected by police investigators. (And social services really weren't at all professional about the process - their representative as good as told my wife to leave me because I was almost certainly guilty).
You then get the additional problem that "I'm being investigated by police because they think I'm a paedophile" isn't something you can easily talk to people about without conclusions being jumped to, and potentially making things even worse.
In summary, don't run a Tor exit node from your home internet connection in the UK unless you really want to see what the inside of a police cell is like, or fancy several months of intense stress in your life. You may think this is just scaremongering, and it won't happen to you, but that was precisely the attitude that resulted in me writing this.
> […] in the UK
Or anywhere else for that matter, unless you are absolutely sure about the legality of the matter and how law enforcement will respond. I am under the impression that only corporations and institutions should run Tor exit nodes.
The UK is probably one of the worst places in the English-speaking world to be accused of hosting something illegal. I've considered hosting a kink social network here (competition with Fetlife), but any sort of image sharing system would leave me incredibly open to the police. I've known people who hosted specific kink-related forums and similar, even without an image upload system, and had huge problems.
As far as I can tell the most reasonable thing to do if I wanted to go through with this would be to develop the software, and sell it on an ongoing basis to a company somewhere with reasonable laws which can actually operate it.
Yeah, that was a fun week when I naively stood up a Tor not-an-exit relay on my home Internet connection and 40% of the Internet turned into "go away" or "enter CAPTCHA to proceed" madness.
> some people have had surprise 6am home visits from law enforcement for running exit nodes
Oh, right. And I even live in Seattle[0] so best not to do that.
0 - http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/03/30/23885710/police-g...
I'm not sure who Amazon Video uses, but they also block relays, not just exit nodes.
So my thought is you probably ran into CDN's of various ilk, likely wasn't your ISP.
For the record, a fair number of large public universities run Tor relays and exits (my lab ran four relays and an exit when I was a grad student), and they seem to be doing okay; we were kind of our "own ISP" but what that really means is you lease everything from the local ISP and get to provision a large sub-block of "their" addresses as you see fit, which in our case was Comcast. I think we had a grand total of one DMCA complaint and no other issues. But it didn't hurt we did have a law school to call on if anything went south (which it didn't).
Misinformed at best: you wouldn't want to DDoS anything over Tor, because 1) the nature of the protocol means that the target receives less data than you are sending; 2) any botnet worth worrying over has much more bandwidth available than Tor's exit bandwidth.
Regarding botnet C&C, the picture is more complicated but 1) there has been a very high-profile case of a botnet using Tor to hide it's C&C activities; “surprisingly”, it's very easy to spot when a significant amount of all Tor clients are bots (i.e. the anonymity set is much too small to hide the botnet); 2) those do not tend to be hosted on behind CDNs.
> But it didn't hurt we did have a law school to call on if anything went south (which it didn't).
That's /very/ true: I would strongly urge anybody who considers running exit nodes to do this within a framework/organization where they can get legal assistance if it is ever needed.
Are you sure about this? How would anybody even know if you're running a relay - those aren't published anywhere. Unless your ISP is doing DPI, in which case running a relay and being a Tor user would look the same to them.
Sites like https://atlas.torproject.org/ will list (exit and non-exit) relays.