Tor Project Experiments With Funding Fast Exit Nodes

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."

Why would anyone ever want to run a Tor exit node?

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean, even if you are paid much more than $100 a month, being legally and financially responsible for the shit that goes on through your server (since you are the EXIT node) could get you sent to jail for life and cost you huge amounts of money. Sounds completely insane for anyone to willingly run such a thing.

Re:Why would anyone ever want to run a Tor exit no

[betterunixthanunix]

It would be nice to think that everyone would all do it, making it basically impossible to harass individual exit nodes

Like how it is impossible to harass individual pot smokers? Even if there were millions of exit nodes, the police would be harassing exit node operators, just to keep everyone afraid.

Re:Not worth it...

[betterunixthanunix]

Pornography and copying files are not universally illegal either. For the purposes of a high school student, the school's rules basically are the law; circumventing a school firewall to read hackaday is only differentiated from a Saudi Arabian citizen accessing Naughty Nurses 2 by the punishment that offender can receive.

The two goals of Tor are censorship busting and privacy enhancement; why focus on controversial things, when there are so many non-controversial things that people are unable to access?