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> Robinson admits it might be safer, legally, to host the Tor relay on rented space from a commercial Internet service to avoid mingling his personal traffic wi

> Robinson admits it might be safer, legally, to host the Tor relay on rented space from a commercial Internet service to avoid mingling his personal traffic with Tor, but he says he shouldn't have to. It'd probably be safer still setup a nonprofit group to own and run the exit node(s).

mtmail 11y ago
There's http://noisetor.net/ http://noisetor.net/ in the US and https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/ in Germany.
thescriptkiddie 11y ago
The problem with running Tor nodes in a datacenter is that mingling your personal traffic with a Tor exit node provides plausible deniability for both you and the people using your node. It's impossible for an advisory to know which traffic is yours and which isn't. Dedicated Tor nodes are suspicious (and often get blacklisted) because they aren't a source of "legitimate" traffic, but Tor nodes run in people's homes don't.
- marshray 11y ago
  > mingling your personal traffic with a Tor exit node provides plausible deniability for both you and the people using your node Wouldn't it be more effective to simply use Tor as intended with somebody else hosting the exit node?
  - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
    In this scenario you are the somebody else hosting the exit node. For the anonymous strangers using the exit node you are hosting for them, they benefit from having their traffic mingled with yours because theirs won't stand out as much. For you, you benefit from having the anonymous strangers' traffic mingled with yours because anyone spying on you will be very confused.
    - marshray 11y ago
      My guess is that a professional analyst is not going to be particularly confused by the addition of a single user's non-Tor traffic to the firehose stream coming out of an exit node. But that's just my guess. Perhaps somebody should ask @snowden.
      - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
        You've got the proportions backwards. A typical Tor exit node only provides a few hundred kib/s of bandwidth, maybe a couple of mib/s for the more generous one. Your traffic, or even the neighbor mooching your WiFi, will be the firehose stream in comparison to that.
kbenson 11y ago
I don't understand this. If the police see the law being broken, they have an obligation to investigate, even if it's probably just the tor exit node. Allowing any random person to forward mail through your address may not end up well for you either, but I think people are more willing to accept that they've opened themselves up to the liability in that case.
- pmocek 11y ago
  > If the police see the law being broken, they have an obligation to investigate I have seen no reporting--not even in Detective Daljit Gill's affidavit in support of her application for search warrant (which I've read)--that police observed any violation of law related to the search. They claim to have received a tip, from 4chan, filtered through a national clearinghouse, that about seven weeks prior someone had allegedly transferred to 4chan a video of an unidentified woman abusing an unidentified child in an unknown location at an unknown time, allegedly from an IP address that they discovered was assigned by an ISP to David and that they learned prior to the search was the exit point from an anonymizing proxy network.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment. Is your point that they should not have bothered to investigate further because they found that there happened to be a TOR exit node? If so, I'm not sure it's a better situation, where the police say "eh, he's probably not trading in child porn himself. We can let this one go." That's just sloppy policing. The point is not whether he was responsible for the child porn traffic, but whether they have an obligation to investigate, and I think they do. In this case, that means a raid, since it's an individual and not a business (a business would likely have people that would speak out, and individual mean that if he's guilty, there's no reason for him to incriminate himself). Even so, raids on businesses happen as well, when there is a belief a evidence might be destroyed.
    - pmocek 11y ago
      Your assertion was based on the flawed premise that police observed a violation of law in this case. I have seen no indication that they saw such. They reportedly acted on a fourth-party tip about a third party claim that an unknown person transferred a file apparently containing evidence of a past crime to that third party's computer. I edited my comment to quote yours in clarification of this.

mtmail 11y ago

There's http://noisetor.net/ http://noisetor.net/ in the US and https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/ in Germany.

thescriptkiddie 11y ago

The problem with running Tor nodes in a datacenter is that mingling your personal traffic with a Tor exit node provides plausible deniability for both you and the people using your node. It's impossible for an advisory to know which traffic is yours and which isn't. Dedicated Tor nodes are suspicious (and often get blacklisted) because they aren't a source of "legitimate" traffic, but Tor nodes run in people's homes don't.

marshray 11y ago
> mingling your personal traffic with a Tor exit node provides plausible deniability for both you and the people using your node Wouldn't it be more effective to simply use Tor as intended with somebody else hosting the exit node?
- thescriptkiddie 11y ago
  In this scenario you are the somebody else hosting the exit node. For the anonymous strangers using the exit node you are hosting for them, they benefit from having their traffic mingled with yours because theirs won't stand out as much. For you, you benefit from having the anonymous strangers' traffic mingled with yours because anyone spying on you will be very confused.
  - marshray 11y ago
    My guess is that a professional analyst is not going to be particularly confused by the addition of a single user's non-Tor traffic to the firehose stream coming out of an exit node. But that's just my guess. Perhaps somebody should ask @snowden.
    - thescriptkiddie 11y ago
      You've got the proportions backwards. A typical Tor exit node only provides a few hundred kib/s of bandwidth, maybe a couple of mib/s for the more generous one. Your traffic, or even the neighbor mooching your WiFi, will be the firehose stream in comparison to that.

kbenson 11y ago

I don't understand this. If the police see the law being broken, they have an obligation to investigate, even if it's probably just the tor exit node. Allowing any random person to forward mail through your address may not end up well for you either, but I think people are more willing to accept that they've opened themselves up to the liability in that case.

pmocek 11y ago
> If the police see the law being broken, they have an obligation to investigate I have seen no reporting--not even in Detective Daljit Gill's affidavit in support of her application for search warrant (which I've read)--that police observed any violation of law related to the search. They claim to have received a tip, from 4chan, filtered through a national clearinghouse, that about seven weeks prior someone had allegedly transferred to 4chan a video of an unidentified woman abusing an unidentified child in an unknown location at an unknown time, allegedly from an IP address that they discovered was assigned by an ISP to David and that they learned prior to the search was the exit point from an anonymizing proxy network.
- kbenson 11y ago
  I'm not sure what this has to do with my comment. Is your point that they should not have bothered to investigate further because they found that there happened to be a TOR exit node? If so, I'm not sure it's a better situation, where the police say "eh, he's probably not trading in child porn himself. We can let this one go." That's just sloppy policing. The point is not whether he was responsible for the child porn traffic, but whether they have an obligation to investigate, and I think they do. In this case, that means a raid, since it's an individual and not a business (a business would likely have people that would speak out, and individual mean that if he's guilty, there's no reason for him to incriminate himself). Even so, raids on businesses happen as well, when there is a belief a evidence might be destroyed.
  - pmocek 11y ago
    Your assertion was based on the flawed premise that police observed a violation of law in this case. I have seen no indication that they saw such. They reportedly acted on a fourth-party tip about a third party claim that an unknown person transferred a file apparently containing evidence of a past crime to that third party's computer. I edited my comment to quote yours in clarification of this.