birb007

Fair point

If that were the case, wouldn't a developer either be using uchar types or wchar_t which have their own specific variants of character related functions?

Sure, as long as it meets the minimum requirements you can operate a node. If you are running it at home, I strongly recommend you don't run an exit node but that's up to you. If you want an easy setup, a bootstrap script does exist: https://github.com/mricon/tor-relay-bootstrap-rpi

Purely speculation but I strongly suspect the subset of malicious tor users engaging in child pornography and human trafficking is extremely, extremely small. The largest group of malicious users is most likely drug and cybercrime related. Is it worth decrying tor as a heaven for pedophiles or human traffickers if they make up a negligible number of users? If so, the same could easily be said about bitcoin or any other decentralised cryptocurrency. The benefits given to journalists, activists, or any individual who wants anonymity for the sake of pricacy is worth more, to me, than maybe helping a negligible number of users. Further, those malicious users would likely find another way to engage in their activities but could the legitimate users?

I feel the same way. The main benefit of a VPS is that they're typically cheap, resource sufficient, and hosted somewhere that isn't your residence. There is an additional benefit, you can spin up a VPS within an hour then deploy a docker image to resume your node. However, a hosting provider may ban tor activity then subsequently disable services for accounts running tor nodes (this is alleviated by the aforementioned quick deployment).

The tor project recommends against using OVH and Hetzner because they have such a large AS presence in the tor network [1]. The tor project also maintains a list of ISPs and they're "friendliness" [2] - some of which are totally anonymous. Every relay operator should familiarise themselves with the ISP page when deploying a relay. Another diversity problem extends to the OSs themselves, Debian has an overwhelming presence [3].

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/TorRelayGuide#... [2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP... [3] https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/#os-distribution-relays

Author here. I thought of it as "is one person escaping an authoritarian regime to communicate freely worth more or less than ten people buying drugs?". A criminal will always find another way to engage in criminal activities, but can a news reporter or activist find another safe way to communicate? I felt as though the benefits to users using tor for legitimate purposes, outweighed the users who used tor maliciously.