4 ms·

It's both. More traffic is better for anonymization but it also consumes finite resources. The solution of course being for more people to run relays.

by zrm 10y ago

d33 10y ago
The thing is that IIRC not everyone can run a relay. Don't you need some decent bandwidth to actually be useful?
- micaksica 10y ago
  Virtually everyone can run a relay. BitTorrent is effectively a "relay" when you seed. The anonymity network I2P actually works in a way that you are both the relay and the client by default. According to Tor, "decent" is 2Mb/sec symmetric, which most any broadband connection can do. I suspect everyone has 2MB/sec lying around. From Tor [1]: The more people who run relays, the faster the Tor network will be. If you have at least 2 megabits/s for both upload and download, please help out Tor by configuring your Tor to be a relay too. There are other ways to contribute to the project as well, such as running bridge relays [2]. These are often less-used but are necessary for the network to work well in places where it needs to be used for censorship circumvention. You can also configure a browser to be a short-lived FlashProxy [3] bridge relay. Even still, throttling bandwidth in your `torrc` means you can easily run a relay on a droplet or EC2 instance and not cost yourself a lot of money. There is also torservers.net [4] for hosting; they accept donations as well. [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en [2] https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en [3] https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/ https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/ [4] https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/
  - vermilingua 10y ago
    Perhaps in Europe and the US, but here in Australia (and many other places I suspect), 2MB/s is a luxury. We have the NBN (partially) rolling out at the moment, but anything better than 12/1mbit will be largely inaccessible to the majority.

It's both. More traffic is better for anonymization but it also consumes finite resources. The solution of course being for more people to run relays.

by zrm 10y ago

It's both. More traffic is better for anonymization but it also consumes finite resources. The solution of course being for more people to run relays.

d33 10y ago

The thing is that IIRC not everyone can run a relay. Don't you need some decent bandwidth to actually be useful?

micaksica 10y ago
Virtually everyone can run a relay. BitTorrent is effectively a "relay" when you seed. The anonymity network I2P actually works in a way that you are both the relay and the client by default. According to Tor, "decent" is 2Mb/sec symmetric, which most any broadband connection can do. I suspect everyone has 2MB/sec lying around. From Tor [1]: The more people who run relays, the faster the Tor network will be. If you have at least 2 megabits/s for both upload and download, please help out Tor by configuring your Tor to be a relay too. There are other ways to contribute to the project as well, such as running bridge relays [2]. These are often less-used but are necessary for the network to work well in places where it needs to be used for censorship circumvention. You can also configure a browser to be a short-lived FlashProxy [3] bridge relay. Even still, throttling bandwidth in your `torrc` means you can easily run a relay on a droplet or EC2 instance and not cost yourself a lot of money. There is also torservers.net [4] for hosting; they accept donations as well. [1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay.html.en [2] https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en [3] https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/ https://crypto.stanford.edu/flashproxy/ [4] https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/
- vermilingua 10y ago
  Perhaps in Europe and the US, but here in Australia (and many other places I suspect), 2MB/s is a luxury. We have the NBN (partially) rolling out at the moment, but anything better than 12/1mbit will be largely inaccessible to the majority.