Hacker News Reader

Comment by o999 | Hacker News Reader

Interestingly enough, there are multiple exit nodes in Russia, as far as I know, law enforcements aren't taking them down

View on HN

Most (all?) of them aren't in Russia. I run half of the "Russian" exits and they are in Norway they just use Russian IPs.

That sounds like a good way to run exit nodes without getting your home raided

How did you implement that? Tailscale?

It's the provider I'm using that does it for the Tor exits people host with them. I don't have my own IPv4 space, which is something like 8k$ for the smallest useful subnet and that's too expensive for a hobby.

They just have a Russian ASN and IP space but it's still located in Norway.

how about a Show HN?

About what? Running Tor nodes is pretty boring as long as you don't get a police visit which I luckily didn't have till now.

you have a german nick name suggesting you are german, you run tor nodes in norway which appear to be located in russia ... i think that is already a lot of technically interesting stuff. also many people would probably like to understand why you do it and how much you spend for this hobby(?).

Dmitry Bogatov had spent 5 months in detention center and 6 more months under a house arrest on terrorism charges for running an exit node.

This was 2017 however and I'm surprised too that crackdown on other exit nodes didn't follow.

Isn't that scarier, knowing that you're using a state-sanctioned exit node?

If I was Russian, sure. I think it’s best to always use exit nodes/proxies in geopolitically opposed countries to prevent collaboration between states. E.g. use western VPNs while in China, use Russian/Chinese tunnels in the west.

Regarding exit nodes, you have to assume the worst anyways, so it should not change much.

In parallel with gea0's comment, using a Russian state-sanctioned exit node would make tracing efforts difficult-to-impossible for western government / law enforcement.

Could you explain what "state-sanctioned" means here?

Whatever xkjyeah meant when he said it.

Likely run by Russian intelligence services or their catspaws and therefore heavily monitored and logged.

US intelligence likely run their own tor nodes as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com