4 ms·
What I don't understand is why Tor doesn't bundle their relays with their clients and have a network that scales better naturally, like I2P, and instead relies
by synchronise 12y ago
What I don't understand is why Tor doesn't bundle their relays with their clients and have a network that scales better naturally, like I2P, and instead relies on people hosting their own, hopefully high bandwidth, relays.
- kijin 12y agoI'm guessing that hosting relays could get people in trouble in some jurisdictions, even if they're just middle relays and not exit nodes. Since the goal of Tor is to let people use the internet safely in such jurisdictions -- in fact, especially in such jurisdictions -- some might consider the loss of relay bandwidth an acceptable compromise.
- tete 12y agoThere are two reasons I see. Trouble in some jurisdictions. But then there is also people who want to secretly use Tor (using Bridges). If for example Chinese (or Iranian or whoever) want to secretly use Tor, which is possible with bridges then it wouldn't be good if they were in a public list. One more reason maybe is that you also want to have Tor running as a weak client, like on your smartphone. On such devices and in such networks running a relay would probably cause issues, both for you, but also for clients. You can't really compare it with Bittorrent, cause what mostly mentions in File Sharing is throughput, whereas Tor also requires low latency for example.
- nhaehnle 12y agoTor has the goal of being high bandwidth and low latency, and relays on home connections can be problematic. Many home connections have rather low upstream bandwidth, for example, so that circuits through such relays would be limited to few KB/s. The idea of having everybody be a relay is definitely tempting, but there are genuine engineering problems with it.