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In other words, they completely fail to understand why Tor works the way it does. It's meant to be a neutral service that can be used to access content some aut

by CM30 9y ago

In other words, they completely fail to understand why Tor works the way it does. It's meant to be a neutral service that can be used to access content some authorities might not like if necessary. Any ability to censor nodes on a gateway level provides an opportunity for unsavoury figures (like governments and businesses) to demand Tor censorship in regards to everything from copyright to political speech they don't agree with.

schoen 9y ago
This proposal was made about hidden services rather than exit nodes. Exit nodes can already refuse to exit to particular sites (by IP address). https://stem.torproject.org/api/exit_policy.html https://stem.torproject.org/api/exit_policy.html However, when doing so, they have to declare this so that nobody will try to exit to those sites through them. They aren't allowed to claim to be able to exit to a site but then refuse to actually do it (if a scanner catches an exit relay doing so, it will be marked as a BadExit). Again, for exit relays, they can openly say "Don't use this relay if you want to access site X", but not "It's fine to use this relay to access site X [but we will secretly then block it]". However, if multiple sites share a single IP address, or if sites use domain fronting to bypass blocking, exit nodes won't succeed in selectively refusing to help people connect to individual sites via exit policy. Hidden services don't have this feature but it would probably be technically possible to add a feature for current-generation hidden services where relays attempt to disrupt connections to particular hidden services (although not all relays will be in a position to do so). In my understand of next-generation hidden services, which are being rolled out now, it's no longer technically possible for relays to do this because the identity of the hidden service being connected to is hidden from everyone. But I'd like to double-check this to better understand exactly what is hidden from whom. The kind of proposal this person made is definitely a non-starter for Tor at the community level; the Tor community overall is committed to the idea that nobody should have the power to monitor or block communications (at least at the network layer). There may be disagreement about how that power should be used when it happens to exist, but I think the community's ideal of trying to get rid of that power is clear.

by CM30 9y ago

schoen 9y ago

This proposal was made about hidden services rather than exit nodes. Exit nodes can already refuse to exit to particular sites (by IP address). https://stem.torproject.org/api/exit_policy.html https://stem.torproject.org/api/exit_policy.html However, when doing so, they have to declare this so that nobody will try to exit to those sites through them. They aren't allowed to claim to be able to exit to a site but then refuse to actually do it (if a scanner catches an exit relay doing so, it will be marked as a BadExit). Again, for exit relays, they can openly say "Don't use this relay if you want to access site X", but not "It's fine to use this relay to access site X [but we will secretly then block it]". However, if multiple sites share a single IP address, or if sites use domain fronting to bypass blocking, exit nodes won't succeed in selectively refusing to help people connect to individual sites via exit policy. Hidden services don't have this feature but it would probably be technically possible to add a feature for current-generation hidden services where relays attempt to disrupt connections to particular hidden services (although not all relays will be in a position to do so). In my understand of next-generation hidden services, which are being rolled out now, it's no longer technically possible for relays to do this because the identity of the hidden service being connected to is hidden from everyone. But I'd like to double-check this to better understand exactly what is hidden from whom. The kind of proposal this person made is definitely a non-starter for Tor at the community level; the Tor community overall is committed to the idea that nobody should have the power to monitor or block communications (at least at the network layer). There may be disagreement about how that power should be used when it happens to exist, but I think the community's ideal of trying to get rid of that power is clear.