Tor Project Experiments With Funding Fast Exit Nodes 96
mask.of.sanity writes "The Tor Project is considering paying exit relay hosts to make the network faster and more secure. The project has called for discussion on the idea, notably from relay hosts. Its founder has suggested $100 a month would attract fast and diverse nodes. Exit nodes are the last hopping point on the Tor network and are critical to its performance and safety."
The problem: "But lately the Tor network has become noticeably faster, and I think it has a lot to do with the growing amount of excess relay capacity relative to network load ... on today's network, clients choose one of the fastest 5 exit
relays around 25-30% of the time, and 80% of their choices come from a
pool of 40-50 relays. ... Since we're
not doing particularly well at diversity with the current approach,
we're going to try an experiment: we'll connect funding to exit relay
operators so they can run bigger and/or better exit relays." As to funding: "We've lined up our first funder (BBG, ...), and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can. They want to sponsor 125+ fast exits."
BBG = Broadcast Board of Governors (Score:3, Informative)
From wiki:
"The Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a bipartisan panel of eight private citizens appointed by the President of the United States and confirmed by the U.S. Senate (the U.S. Secretary of State is an ex officio member of the Board), is the oversight body for official U.S. international broadcasts by both federal agencies and government-funded corporations. In addition to VOA, these include the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB, which includes Radio and TV Marti) and grantee corporations: the Middle East Broadcasting Network (MBN, which includes Radio Sawa and Al Hurra television in Arabic); Radio Farda (in Persian) for Iran; Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, which are aimed at the ex-communist states and countries under oppressive regimes in Asia. In recent years, VOA has expanded its television coverage to many areas of the world. This governing body was established in 1993 to replace the Board for International Broadcasters, which was created in 1973 to manage broadcasting companies previously funded by the CIA."
More from Cryptome: http://cryptome.org/2012/07/tor-exits-usg-funds.htm
Re:Why would anyone ever want to run a Tor exit no (Score:5, Informative)
[anecdote]
I had legal troubles* as someone used my exit node for downloading child pornography. after nearly 2 years the prosecutor closed the proceedings as he found nothing punishable.
*) including some officers searching my flat at 7 am and all my hardware was confiscated
Re:Why would anyone ever want to run a Tor exit no (Score:5, Informative)
Hi, I help run an exit node. Specifically NoiseTor - http://noisetor.net/ [noisetor.net] Yes, we do get police/FBI/etc calls regularly. Most of the time it takes a few min of explaining what tor is, we have no logs, and there's nothing we can do to help track down where the traffic came from.
It's invaluable to run exit nodes, and the risks are fairly minor.
Re:Okay, how can we make Anonymous exit nodes? (Score:2, Informative)
Buy a server using an anonymous payment method, run the exit node on it, pay no more than monthly in case it gets taken down (ISP is uncomfortable, etc.), accept donations using an anonymous payment method. You can spend the received money anonymously, or otherwise carefully clean them before accessing with your personal identity.
I do something like this for I2P and Freenet and never tried running a TOR exit node this way, but I don't see why it wouldn't work.