Genuine question, what sort of risks are associated with running this on a typical residential connection?
Second thing that happened is I worked at the power company and the union went on strike. While on strike some dummy put in a lot of power outage reports and used tor. So IT wanted to see if anyone else was using tor and my IP when I worked from home came up as Tor so I had to go through a whole thing at work that I just run a bridge and I had nothing to do with the tickets. They requested I stop running the bridge and I did.
No more tor bridges for me!
Its sort of like how you were free to do anything you wanted in the soviet union, you just had to accept the consequences that if you do something the state doesn't like you will end up in the gulag.
You do have some relative, qualified freedoms from government interference.
However, its entirely possible to still be quite restricted in your speech as a practical matter under american style "freedom of speech". For example, rightly or wrongly, parlor had trouble obtaining services. The government didn't interfere, but as a practical matter they probably had more trouble getting their "mesage" out than opposition groups in countries without freedom of speech that could more easily rely on international resources.
And that's not neccesarily a bad thing. America has identified freedom of speech as a sort of fundamental good - so instead of being truthful about it being a qualified right, seem to instead try to redefine the term so that anything not covered by by first amendment isn't "true" freedom of speech.
After all the saying goes: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" not "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to be free from government interference in saying it". There is much more to freedom of speech than just what the first amendment covers.
Everything in life has consequences. You have to weigh them.
Does that feel like freedom to you?
- whether the consequences are appropriate
- whether they are natural, a side effect of intervention, or direct consequence of intervention
For example, if you criticise the king of Thailand while in Thailand or as a Thai person you will have committed the crime of lese-majesty and can get you 15 years per instance. If we apply your principle of that being an example of freedom for which "you just have to accept the consequences" then we have learnt nothing and provided nothing of worth. If, however we ask whether that is appropriate and whether it can change (it is a direct intervention so it can) then we can assess it.
That clearly does impact freedom, as does the bank deciding not to serve a customer that is running a Tor node. How is it their business anyway? What impact does running a bridge have on them? Regardless, let's say it was an exit node and the OP was accessing bank services via their own exit node - do they not authenticate the customers accessing their accounts?
That sounds like it has nothing to do with you running a bridge but about you connecting to work through tor. And/Or you weren’t running a bridge but a public relay. In either case the company’s IT sound like dummys.
Seems like you're mixing up the terminology (which is understandable, I've done it myself a couple of times in the past).
https://support.torproject.org/censorship/censorship-7/
Bridge relays are Tor relays that are not listed in the public Tor directory.
> On another note a coworker downloaded a bollywood movie on BitTorrent and forgot to stop sharing and connected to the work VPN and IT got a dmca notice. They then went on a huge investigation about BitTorrent. Some people got nasty emails their IP was listed on public trackers.
If they were listed as seeds illegally sharing copyright-protected content (and the kids weren't just downloading Debian ISOs), that's par for course.
Your power company story is even worse, because the people who supposedly know how computers work couldn't be bothered to find out how running a bridge does has nothing to do with requests coming in.
I wonder if these companies are so aggressive against things like cheap VPNs and Apple's private relays as they are against TOR.
Running an exit node is likely to give you issues, though.
Users sometimes believe lies online (ie bridge internet extension is OK or not noticeable) and create a lot of trouble for themselves.
Profile sync can bring that extension onto your work computer as an example I’m familiar with. If you are bridging tor at work not great
Running a bridge with the Snowflake extension/webpage does not put your IP on the public list of Tor nodes: https://tb-manual.torproject.org/bridges/
Being careful not to sync personal settings/extensions to a work machine is certainly good advice.
If you run any game with anti-cheat (which is many) most will have process monitoring. Endpoint tools can also monitor. In the past (I'm not current) you could look at connections using self signed SSL certificates on network, so network monitoring tools could be used to pick up folks pushing tor traffic over your network. You could also watch for folks connecting to tor exit nodes (this used to be public info).
Bridges don't connect to exit nodes.
However they will be most likely preoccupied with the new release at the moment.
FYI: Tor Browser User Manual <https://tb-manual.torproject.org>
Tor Support <https://support.torproject.org>
EDIT: this is the official recommendation from Tor. Spare the downvotes for one minute.
It requires bridges, relays and exit nodes to build a circuit and communicate.
The client does not know what latency exists between the chosen nodes when builds a circuit.
If the nodes are located in large datacenters in good locations you'll have acceptable latency relatively often. If they are on residential ISPs it might not be the case.
Perhaps things have improved in the meantime. https://community.torproject.org/relay/relays-requirements/ does not mention latency.