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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is wondering about the risk related to running one of these tor cloud instances. The bridges are configured to only accept and relay traffic to and from other tor nodes. The exit policy is reject everything. These instances will never be the last hop of a tor circuit...

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I've been running an exit node on EC2 for a few months and I've only received 1 DMCA notice and I responded that I was running a tor node and was not legally responsible for the traffic I was producing and it was resolved. Their EULA does not explicitly prevent you from doing this so if you don't mind dealing with the feigning bulldogs every once in a while it's not that bad.

Could you be more specific? Did anyone from Amazon have to intervene? Or was it enough to show the EULA?

Amazon sent the DMCA on behalf of the copyright owners, I responded with the EULA and a up front response about what I was using my image for, saying if I was in violation I would terminate my image immediately. They said thanks for explaining the situation and I haven't heard anything since then.

I always thought that "not legally responsible for traffic" was the best guess at the legal theory. Is there now actual precedence supporting your statement?

So, we'll have plenty of relays, all fundamentally under Amazon's control.

But exit nodes are a problem; how can we get people to run those?

Do you run an exit node? If not why?

Edit: You were probably asking about EC2 exit nodes. It's a little better than having it in my house, but at the end of the day, I would still be worried about landing in court over the traffic the node handles.

Nope, because I'm chicken. Also, I have crap bandwidth.

I would, but here in Germany I can be held responsible for any illegal acts that are commited through my connection ("Mitstörerhaftung"). I don't want to lose all my computers and face an expensive legal battle because someone posted some child porn through my node.

if tor users would stop running bittorrent through it, my two nodes would still be exits instead of relays. DMCA complaints can quickly take down an exit node in the US.

You realise you can offer an exit node for only certain ports? It's not perfect for what you want but its a start.

I run an exit node, but not on a US-based server given DMCA complaints becomes tiresome.

Single best thing you can do is run the "this is a tor exit router" (google for it) web page on port 80 of your TOR exit node --- that demonstrates you know what your rights are.

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