It seems that there are at most 10000 Tor nodes.
Are the identity of the node operators known? Do known trusted organizations and individuals own the majority of these nodes?
It’s indeed expensive and risky for individuals to run Tor notes.
Are the identity of the node operators known? Do known trusted organizations and individuals own the majority of these nodes?
It’s indeed expensive and risky for individuals to run Tor notes.
It's up to individual relay operators whether or not to publish contact information. For an example, see one of my relays here: https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/w/relay/375DCBB2DBD94E52...
(If you're not an exit relay, it's neither risky nor expensive.)
I have no clue as to what security this provides nowadays. I predict the NSA or FBI have large scale packet timing correlation in operation now. Or the random number generator has been compromised, or there are a series of bugs in the Tor or I2P implementation itself? I also think there was a human compromise of the Tor Project itself 8-9 years ago as well, it has been significantly weakened.
Personally I tend to like one-way data broadcasting systems, that way the receivers cannot be traced if they are air-gapped, e.g. satellite or radio data broadcasting. However nobody operates any useful service nowadays. Twenty years ago you could receive the whole worldwide Usenet feed with a DVB-S PCI card, unencrypted in the clear from a service called Cidera[1]. It was just UDP multicast packets containing Usenet messages, split into fragments with sequence numbers, trivial to reverse engineer.
I had this at service home, we had dial-up and with a 55cm satellite dish in my bedroom window, I had a 45Mb/s data feed. I wrote my own software including a device driver for the DVB-S card running under FreeBSD (4.2-RELEASE I believe). Nearly 1000x faster than dial up, which was mind-blowing back then.
Also archiving Nostr text messages is interesting, you can get the entire worldwide feed of messages from the relays, and then search for whatever topic of interest you want in the messages. Nobody can tell what you are searching for, unless your computer is compromised. I'm thinking about broadcasting these by satellite somehow, but satellite bandwidth is very expensive. It's just a matter of getting the funds for it.
Reception should be possible using a RTL-SDR or AD9364+USB3.0 microcontroller[2], and a satellite TV dish. The AD9364 chip can be had from AliExpress[3] for $6 now.
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20020806064624/http://www.cidera...
That sounds like a pretty unique approach to Usenet content delivery. I wonder if anything else/similar has existed/exists (unlikely in Usenet and I can't think of something quite as useful).
Running a non-exit node carries very little to no risk.
For this reason not all nodes may be guard nodes, as decided by the directory authorities, and guard nodes are maintained for a longer time by the client to reduce the chance that you pick a compromised guard node because you switch often. This is balanced against the risk that you are unlucky and pick a compromised guard at first (which you then maintain for a longer time).
The exit node is pretty much assumed to be compromised, as it's a role not available to many entities – it requires high bandwidth and much teeth-gritting – and the public internet is intercepted at large anyway.
I haven't been very active in the space for about a decade, I'd also love a more knowledgeable answer