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Comment by dannyw | Hacker News Reader

So what if you're on a list?

I ran a Tor exit node on my home static IP for years. No dramas.

At least in Germany you run a reasonably large risk of getting a visit from the police and getting all your stuff confiscated when running a Tor exit node.

> I ran a Tor exit node on my home static IP for years. No dramas.

Yet.

I mean, being on the list doesn't matter until it matters. If nobody ever wants to harm you, being exposed doesn't matter. If anybody ever wants to, having given them material in the past will make your current day defense harder.

I'm not sure how you managed to do that. I ran a few exit VPSes and they were shut down in less than two weeks for hacking complaints.

Anecdotal

Yup; the grandparent is likely on a List already for being involved in child pornograpy and such (inadvertently, but you know that's a big part of what TOR is used for).

Don't shoot the messenger

> but you know that's a big part of what TOR is used for

Citation needed please.

That's the juicier stuff that makes its way into the news. "A person living under an oppressive government evading censorship" will never be as juicy to write about as "murderers for hire on the dark web". That says absolutely nothing about the actual usage of Tor, so I'd like to see you back up that "big part" part.

This is the media doing their job. You don't listen on news about how a great chef used her knife to slice a piece of meat, but you do when someone uses one to slice another person. We need to be aware of misuses of tools in other to weed out bad actors, leaving the legitimate uses in place.

I agree, that's part of the media's job, but the struggle with that is that there's no tool to give us a sense of normalcy - the news is what's new and newsworthy, but we have nothing to ground us, cause no one would watch it.

I agree, I just disagree with the generalization based off of those news. Tor is a tool and as such can be used for both good and bad.

It bothers me when people draw badly considered conclusions from them, such as claiming that "most" or a "big part" of Tor is dedicated to illegal activities. The percentage is probably greater than on the "normal" web, but I object to the stronger claims than that.

Exit nodes are used to access clearnet sites, which nobody is going to use to serve child pornography.

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