Comment by benjaminpv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benjaminpv | Hacker News Reader

Serious question for people that are familiar with Tor: given that we've already seen people get arrested for simply running an exit node, have features like hidden services made it any safer for someone that agrees with tor's purpose (providing a less restricted end point to people that are censored by their governments) to keep an exit node running?

It seems to me that arresting an exit node's maintainer for child porn serves to have a real chilling effect on the system. As much as I'd like to provide, say, a dissident with a means to voice their opinion, it's not going to help when the cops cart away the exit note and haul me off to jail.

I guess what I'm thinking is that hidden tor services sort of 'close the gap' when it comes to problems like I describe above, since conceivably a political dissident could post to a hidden service (never appearing on the Internet at large) and have something of an intermediary in a country with greater freedom post it for them?

I am one of the persons behind https://www.torservers.net/ , a collective of non-profit organizations that run Tor exit relays thanks to your donations. :) I am not aware of any "arrests" anywhere, although some exit relay operators have been raided and their equipment seized in the past. I understand this might scare away some people from running exit relays. You can still contribute to the network by running non-exit relays.

Hidden Services use only the internal network and don't rely on exit relays at all. All communication is end-to-end encrypted, so all relays will only ever see encrypted content.

If you have less than a couple of Mbit/s of upload capacity, you might want to run a bridge. Bridges are especially useful for people in heavily censored regions, and only provide an entry point to the Tor network.

Exit node operator here, had to login to address your comment.

One of the bigger advantages of a hidden service is that you can't be sure who's hosting it and where. They're great for hosting websites but do nothing for allowing access to other services. If you're worried about trouble from running an exit node you could contribute by running a relay or a hidden bridge which would be way more useful than a hidden service.

I've actually been contacted by the Michigan State Police in a child porn investigation and after explaining that I run a TOR exit node and have no ability to help in their investigation the officer I talked to was quite pleasant. I've heard nothing about it since then.

There are several news outlets that run hidden services for whistle blowers and people in danger or unable to speak openly so your idea isn't without merit but it does require pre-planning to be of any use. If you've got no way to communicate the existence of your service to people before they need it, it'll be of little use.

I've talked to someone who runs an exit node. They not only have avoided hassle, but they run it via Amazon, which is supposedly against ToS. No issues so far.

Also, if people would like to help Tor but are afraid of running an exit node, Noisebridge (a hackerspace) runs a fucking giant exit node. Donating time or money to them would help.

Many non-profits or universities run exit nodes.

I have a tor relay on amazon[1] and have had no problems.

https://cloud.torproject.org/

Exit relays can be run on AWS, but it's a waste of money. You'd be better off with an inexpensive VPS from a Tor-friendly provider. Donations of any amount can also be sent to TorServers.net.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP...

I'm running an exit for $5/month on DigitalOcean that blows through its 1TB of transfer in ~3 days. I've received one complaint about it (due to someone emailing their abuse address) and their support gave me no trouble when I explained what was happening.

Someone managing an exit node is effectively running an ISP - presumably in the USA they get protection under safe-harbour provisions like those of the DMCA (17 USC 512).

Aren't there also safe-harbour provisions for transmission of lewd/indecent content and for trademarks, libels and such?

Of course there being legitimacy of your actions in statute [if indeed that's the case] wouldn't mean you don't get hauled off to jail.

I don't think those provisions have ever been tested in court by an exit node operator.

No exit node operator has ever been taken to court over something like this. The police eventually realize their mistake, realize the Tor node is of no help to their investigation, and move on.

As more law enforcement become literate in technology and become aware of what Tor is, this will happen less than the vanishingly improbable rate that it happens now, until it never happens at all.

As far as I know arrests or searches only happened for people who ran exit node on their home connection. Running exits on hosting services puts you into a different category for the police, namely good guy to ask for traces instead of bad guy to bust.

Anyway, I'm only running two non-exits. :-)

Exit nodes are not necessary to connect to hidden services, regular relays are used for that who do not know where the data comes from, or where it goes to. The hidden services exist within the tor network, thus no exit is needed.

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