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CDN's tend to block Tor. A lot of the Web is stood up behind one CDN or another. Cloudflare is the one that sticks out to me. But then again, a lot of people do

CDN's tend to block Tor. A lot of the Web is stood up behind one CDN or another. Cloudflare is the one that sticks out to me. But then again, a lot of people do use Tor to do stupid shit like DDoS or run C&C for botnets. So my thought is you probably ran into CDN's of various ilk, likely wasn't your ISP. For the record, a fair number of large public universities run Tor relays and exits (my lab ran four relays and an exit when I was a grad student), and they seem to be doing okay; we were kind of our "own ISP" but what that really means is you lease everything from the local ISP and get to provision a large sub-block of "their" addresses as you see fit, which in our case was Comcast. I think we had a grand total of one DMCA complaint and no other issues. But it didn't hurt we did have a law school to call on if anything went south (which it didn't).

nbraud 10y ago
> But then again, a lot of people do use Tor to do stupid shit like DDoS or run C&C for botnets. Misinformed at best: you wouldn't want to DDoS anything over Tor, because 1) the nature of the protocol means that the target receives less data than you are sending; 2) any botnet worth worrying over has much more bandwidth available than Tor's exit bandwidth. Regarding botnet C&C, the picture is more complicated but 1) there has been a very high-profile case of a botnet using Tor to hide it's C&C activities; “surprisingly”, it's very easy to spot when a significant amount of all Tor clients are bots (i.e. the anonymity set is much too small to hide the botnet); 2) those do not tend to be hosted on behind CDNs. > But it didn't hurt we did have a law school to call on if anything went south (which it didn't). That's /very/ true: I would strongly urge anybody who considers running exit nodes to do this within a framework/organization where they can get legal assistance if it is ever needed.

nbraud 10y ago

> But then again, a lot of people do use Tor to do stupid shit like DDoS or run C&C for botnets. Misinformed at best: you wouldn't want to DDoS anything over Tor, because 1) the nature of the protocol means that the target receives less data than you are sending; 2) any botnet worth worrying over has much more bandwidth available than Tor's exit bandwidth. Regarding botnet C&C, the picture is more complicated but 1) there has been a very high-profile case of a botnet using Tor to hide it's C&C activities; “surprisingly”, it's very easy to spot when a significant amount of all Tor clients are bots (i.e. the anonymity set is much too small to hide the botnet); 2) those do not tend to be hosted on behind CDNs. > But it didn't hurt we did have a law school to call on if anything went south (which it didn't). That's /very/ true: I would strongly urge anybody who considers running exit nodes to do this within a framework/organization where they can get legal assistance if it is ever needed.