On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 1:48 PM, Sebastian Hahn <m...@sebastianhahn.net> wrote:
>> Is tortunnel evil since it maybe hacks Tor-cirucits to reduce the number >> of relays ? > > Yes, unfortunately quite a few people use it. > It hurts the network by endangering exit node operators, and > by completely ignoring any of the load balancing that happens > in normal Tor. I agree with most of what you have had to say, though, this gets to the heart of why its not just "bad for you" but "abusive to the community". However, I am not sure that I understand how this is the case. Certainly there is a certain amount of sense to the idea that tortunnel traffic may use another system that focuses more on speed if tortunnel was unavailable. However, an assumption is an assumption and I am not sure how much I buy the truth of it. Is there an argument for the problem beyond this? What load balancing mechanisms is it ignoring? Is this ignorance a symptom of what it tries to do, or a symptom of ignorant design (ie just plain ignoring network information that it is the client's job to respect?). I ask for two reasons. The first is logical accuracy, what its trying to do, while bad for user anonymity, doesn't, on its face, seem like a real problem for tor exit node runners. The second is that I have considered writting a client myself (I have some things that I want to play with that is a bit beyond what the current client can do... like rendezvous nodes that don't publish in the public directory) and I wouldn't want to end up being considered an abuser >> Where is the security/anonymity reduction since tortunnel also uses >> Tor ? > > Anonymity is entirely gone. A bit overstated but, not far off. It is as anonymous as any single hop relay. Also, since it tries to emulate tor traffic to trick the node, well, if you were running a node (even a non-exit), I would think that tortunnel traffic would be very hard to distinguish from non-tortunnel. Of course... this wouldn't help if speed is your goal. -Steve *********************************************************************** To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to majord...@torproject.org with unsubscribe or-talk in the body. http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/