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I don't understand why these TOR guys can't rent like 10-20 cheap VPSs all around the world and do their testing there. They are describing getting 11 nodes lik
by imaginenore 10y ago
I don't understand why these TOR guys can't rent like 10-20 cheap VPSs all around the world and do their testing there. They are describing getting 11 nodes like some sort of struggle.
VPSs are truly cheap now, you can get one for $3.52 per year:
https://lowendbox.com/blog/i-83-100mbps-unmetered-openvz-nat-vps-starting-at-2-50year-resource-pools-in-usa-eu-and-asia/ https://lowendbox.com/blog/i-83-100mbps-unmetered-openvz-nat...
- Vendan 10y agoDidn't read that way to me. Read like they normally use VMs on their computer to have a "testing tor net", but decided to set up actual distributed nodes for testing this. More like, "Hey look, this is nifty", rather then "Ugh, it was so hard to set this up"
- nxzero 10y agoWhere would the funds to run the servers come from? Why do you believe these "cheap" servers would be secure?
- imaginenore 10y agoFunds? That's $35 for 10 nodes per year. I'm pretty sure a team of developers can handle that. And who cares if they are insecure? It's for testing only. The code is open source anyway.
- 1024core 10y agoWhere can you get a VPS for $3.50/year? Please tell us.
- imaginenore 10y agoRead the root comment in this chain.
- jimktrains2 10y agoCan you show me where I can get a $3.50 per year VPS.
- imaginenore 10y agoRead the root comment in this chain
- falcolas 10y agoQuite a few VPS providers and ISPs will block TOR services out of the gate. Here's their overview page: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP...
- arca_vorago 10y agoYep, in the earlier tor days it was obscure enough to be doable, but I haven't run an exit node in so long I have no idea who would actually host one now. On top of that, the bandwidth used can eat budgets super fast!
- ryanlol 10y ago>On top of that, the bandwidth used can eat budgets super fast! Bandwidth isn't expensive though, unless you need "premium" bandwidth. Case in point, I've used petabytes of bandwidth for scanning this year and and probably spent less than $2k total on both the scanning hardware and the bandwidth. Realistically I've only spent a few hundred dollars on the BW itself. And good luck even maxing a gigabit line with Tor, it's not easy.
- ryanlol 10y agoI've hosted a plenty of exits, there's no lack of friendly ISPs.
- detaro 10y ago> They are describing getting 11 nodes like some sort of struggle. Where are they doing that? I see nothing the like in the article. Only that this was the first time they did a test of that scale, not that there was anything preventing them from doing it earlier.
- sanqui 10y agoIn addition to what other replies have said, using their own computers has the advantage of testing on a variety of systems, environments, and connections. VPS would be fairly monolithic.
- h4waii 10y agoAnd they also explicitly prohibit using Tor, it's right in their ToS => https://quadhost.net/policies/terms-of-service/ https://quadhost.net/policies/terms-of-service/ Many of the cheap (read: sub $10/year) OpenVZ VPS offerings prohibit ANY type of Tor traffic, even use of a client (such as torsocks) - I've used many of them, and they are quick to detect and suspend based on traffic analysis.
- ashitlerferad 10y agoThe security of the Tor network depends on diversity of relays and exit nodes. If the Tor project ran all nodes, then that is low sysadmin diversity (but high network and jurisdiction diversity) and thus lower security.