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Comment by arktos_ | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my ignorance, but I thought it fruitful to ask: Are there any issues that can arise by doing this on a VPS?

I ask because I know of stories of law enforcement sending inquiries to owners of, say, exit nodes requiring certain information about given traffic. I don't know if this happens for middle-nodes (or whatever they're called).

Moreover, are there any issues with associating a node to, you know, your name and billing information?

I don't know much about this, and although I could look it up, I think that my questions - and your respective answers or those of others - might do some public service of information sharing here.

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I never operated a TOR node, but as far as I know and heard from other sources, TOR realays don't get much attention from law enforcement, it any attention at all. Which makes sense: all they're doing is getting encrypted traffic in and giving encrypted traffic out. It would hard for them to link a relay node to a specific connection, and even if they do, you can't help them in any way: even you as the node operator are only able to see encrypted traffic.

Edit: there's a youtuber called "Mental Outlaw" that published a while ago some videos about setting up and operating TOR nodes. He sometimes gives inaccurate information regarding more theoretical topics, so I don't follow him much. But I think he can be trusted for this practical topics.

Just a quick note on the Youtube channel you mention: I follow his videos for a while and it seems to me, that he's half a shill. My impression is, that he re-models popular HN threads into Youtube videos. Just watch the latest video on the MrBeast topic and you'll basically get the same info as all the popular 'root' comments (was on HN front page last week). Not the first time I noticed a suspicious connection.

It would be funny if he makes a new video about TOR and ends up mentioning your comment :D

Wow, I was about to comment the same thing. Glad to have my assumptions validated by someone else.

While that is a crappy thing to do, I bet tons of YouTubers are doing just that. Hell, most political YouTubers just read articles and make stupid comments about them.

It would be impossible to create daily content if you weren't just rehashing, or taking, information from somewhere. Again, not defending it at all, just saying it's probably a very common thing. Like how some crappy news articles are just a bunch of reddit comments, like that qualifies as news.

If you ever fall into "hustler-get-rich-quick" shorts/reels/tik-toks, it is full of people laying out the same exact scheme:

Make a channel

Find popular reddit/social media post

Use AI tools for text to speech

Use AI tools to generate pictures

Stitch it all together

Post on channel.

Agreed. Extra: I'd generally say, that comments on HN are often interesting and insightful (that's why we're here, no?). With the current state of social media, I'd wish for a little more HN flavor. But at least credit your source. The information you provide doesn't get less valuable only because someone else did the work.

> While that is a crappy thing to do,

I haven't watched this particular channel so maybe it's obviously shady, but I'm curious: why is this conceptually a crappy thing to do?

I mean, if you take the IP of others and redistribute it verbatim then I definitely see the ethical issue. So if the claim is that he's reading peoples' comments or posts verbatim without credit then yeah that's crappy. Don't get me wrong.

But if all we're talking about is "mining" websites like HN for topics and then creating original content that covers those topics in a different format for a different audience... where's the issue?

A few years ago I was feeling pretty burned out in the tech industry and created a tongue in cheek "luddite" channel called TechPhobe where I took an overly pessimistic view of the industry. At the time Elizabeth Holmes was on trial and a lot my videos involved me reading ArsTechnica articles on the subject (credited) while offering my personal opinions on the matter. While not successful, those videos got more views than anything else I ever created. Was that a crappy thing to do? I didn't think so at the time and I don't think so now.

I didn't stick with the channel because I realized pretty quickly that if I'm dealing with burnout the last thing I should be doing in my spare time is focusing on tech content lol

> But if all we're talking about is "mining" websites like HN for topics and then creating original content that covers those topics in a different format for a different audience... where's the issue?

Plagiarism, generally. I really enjoyed the semi-recent hbomberguy video on why it matters, and a later response (from another channel) on "The Somerset Scale of Plagiarism" for a more rigorous explanation of what the different kinds of "content reuse" can be. Those are generally where my current model of plagiarism comes from.

A specific concern would be the inaccurate telling of information that isn't understood. A video saying, "Here I will summarize this HN thread," is perfectly ok, and a good thing. A video saying, "Here I will tell you how $thing works," should be well researched and cited. Doesn't matter if the content's entirely from an HN thread for from 40 different SEO farms, it's low-quality content and it's wasting everyone's time at best, and probably actively misinforming people. (Because how true and complete is information gleaned from HN comments anyway?)

Mental Outlaw definitely doesn't know how to threat model anything. Keeps assuming you'll be targeted specifically, but then tries to evade that with i2p and Tor. Most people aren't going to be specifically targeted though, especially if they keep a low profile (i.e. don't be one of ~50k i2p users, that's sure to be a selector) and especially not for torrenting content illegally (as opposed to illegal content).

If your threat model is actually three letter agencies coming after you specifically... that's an entirely different problem not (just) solved by software.

I ran tor exit nodes on Linode and Digitalocean for years. No real issues, but you will get regular abuse complaints.

The support teams always understood once I explained it was a tor exit node. I co-operated with the Cloud provider and added any IP-address that requested it to my list of exempt addresses.

> The support teams always understood

But they don't have to. It could also be against their ToS, and many other providers would not have been ok with it. Accounts and domains have been taken away for much less.

Right, which is why it's informative to hear a report that DO and linode did!

So read the ToS and ask support beforehand?

Not to mention, armed police raiding your home, especially if you live in Germany.

There was a recent HN topic where person running exit nodes run into quite a lot of issues because of it.

Non-exit nodes are generally considered safe to run. it's only exit nodes that system enforcement keeps trying to shut down.

I'm not an exit node.

You can buy a vps with xmr if you're worried about privacy from law enforcement.

most vps don't support xmr though. any suggestions to whom I can trust (I basically only trust hetzner in vps space)

https://monerica.com/

ctrl-f for web hosting

Some do though. I got started a minecraft server the other month that i paid for in xmr. You can go to like a VPS aggregator like serverhunter.com and filter those that allow altcoins as payment

https://www.serverhunter.com/#query=stock%3A%28in_stock+OR+u...

>I basically only trust hetzner in vps space

https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/

What's more alarming to me is that they (the jabber operators) seemingly stopped caring about it. Whatever this intercepting proxy did (including from the sound of it, spoofing ACME challenges from their domain to get a certificate) could be illegal and they didn't even attempt to do anything about it, AND they are assuming that continuing to use the service after the attack stopped is somehow safe now.

Either they are grossly negligent/incompetent (IMO unlikely given the extent of their research), or they knew it was intercepted on purpose (either by law enforcement, the provider itself or one of their upstreams) and intentionally aren't saying so. They could also be withholding or lying about any number of things, including the exact response from the hosting providers.

interesting.

I am kind of shocked because I really got positive feedback of hetzner from what I heard from people.

I need to post about this on r/vps and hear about people's opinion.

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