Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfiedotwtf | Hacker News Reader

If it’s that expensive to run Tor nodes, who is actually paying for them? I’ve heard individuals getting doors kicked in for participating in the network, so it’s not individuals. Corporates too wouldn’t want this type of burden… so is it really just spy-vs-spy

View on HN

Many individuals contribute to running relays. And there are non-profit organizations collecting donations to operates Tor exit nodes:

- https://www.torservers.net/

- https://nos-oignons.net/

This is probably strictly true but it smacks to me of 'many people say'. I wonder what % of TOR nodes are run by people with an ideological allegiance for the network vs how many are run by nation-state actors.

I run a non-exit node any time I have the spare resources. I2P too. This means they're on the same popular providers that have too many other nodes, though.

Sometimes I set it up as a bridge (hidden entry node) instead.

only exit nodes get there door kicked in and they are the minority and not needed for the tor network to function

They are pretty essential, without them you can only access onion services.

exit nodes aren't used for the onion services. only when interacting with the clearnet.

You are both saying the same thing, you just differ on the degree to which you see that as a problem.

> I’ve heard individuals getting doors kicked in for participating in the network, so it’s not individuals.

It's individuals

Unless something has changed, one of the issues with Tor is that it tries to send traffic through servers that have the most bandwidth which are pretty much certain to be servers owned by the state a lot of the time because a random person's residential cable modem is going to be a lot less capable.

Run by individuals doesn't necessarily mean run on potato hardware. I ran a highly reputable (non-exit) node on a beefy but underutilised dedicated server for at least half a decade.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com