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Comment by setheron | Hacker News Reader

If its that cheap and the bandwidth is limited by the exit nodes, why don't we just spin up 1000 exit nodes ? I'd like to use Tor more if it was a bit speedier.

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Well, one single person running 1000 exit nodes would be potentially armful. Same for 1000 exit nodes running on the same network.

That's why it's not very practical to simply write a deployment script for some major cloud provider and let people run with it. (Also, bandwidth tends to be expensive there)

However, if you mean for 1000 HN denizens to start operating their own exit nodes, then by all means go for it :) (Be aware, though, that some people can get quite obnoxious, regardless of the actual legality of running an exit node.)

PS: As already mentioned in this thread, for the sake of full disclosure, I run a non-profit that runs exit nodes.

> why don't we just spin up 1000 exit nodes?

People are scared by some horror stories. Terrorism in the traditional sense of the word, as done by a government, is what is happening here: raid a few people and the whole community backs off. I have to admit that it makes me more hesitant too.

> I'd like to use Tor more if it was a bit speedier.

It's more than just having enough bandwidth. Tor picks random servers to relay through. Say you are in silicon valley and want to connect to Gmail via Tor. Tor might, in a really bad case, choose a server in Germany, Japan and South Africa. Now your traffic has to travel from the US to Germany to Japan to South Africa and to the US again. Limited by the speed of light (light is slow), that takes a while -- probably almost a second for a single round-trip. Connecting via HTTPS will suck and online shooter games are out of the question, no matter whether you have 56kbps or 180gbps available.

In most cases it's a lot better than this, but it remains random chance. I used Tor daily for a few months and often didn't notice any difference between normal WiFi and Tor, but sometimes it was also a bit annoying.

I would say many people are put off by the morality of it. Sure you're helping people in oppressive regimes avoid censorship, but you're also helping scum in a way many people aren't comfortable with or want to be connected with.

Maybe, but this is actually the first time I've heard that point of view. I'm not saying nobody thinks that, I just haven't heard it before.

Really?

TOR interests me but I'd never run an exit node because I'm assuming one of three things is gonna come out of it: dissidents, criminal activity, or spook traffic (it was literally made by and for naval intelligence /the CIA).

You can make an ethical argument for the first one but I still don't want any of those three running out of my machines...

That would be a reason not to run tor relays at all. I do run two non-exits, but I leave the exits to other folks.

Tor relies on various kinds of diversity to protect anonymity. Your proposal probably reduces diversity in terms of sysadmin, hoster, network and jurisdiction.

I interpret his message differently, namely the "we" I see as referring to the community as a whole. It's not that dirt-cheap that any individual could host 1000 servers anyway, even at only $5 a month that would be $60k a year, which I doubt many individuals are going to not care about.

Well, you can contribute, and it will only cost you about 5$ / month! Tor, by design, has some latency issues, and can also have exit node bottlenecks. I think people only run intermediate relays because of a "myth" that you'll get raided at 4 am if you run one. It has happened in the past to some operators, however, in this blog, I wanted to show that it's not always that way.

Makes me wonder if Tor had an automated way to spin up servers and outsource admin if more servers would be around.

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