Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On 1/8/13 10:40 PM, Moritz Bartl wrote: I wrote a small incapable script [4] that visualizes how often a relay is a fast relay over time. In its current form, it is not very helpful, but slightly modified to output monthly overviews or just a percentage figure per relay, it might already be good enough to define when a reward is granted (after it became part of the rewards program) and when/if the operator needs to do additional explaining of downtimes etc. Feedback and patches welcome. Please see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/7895 for my feedback. Best, Karsten [4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-November/001725.html ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hi, On 23.07.2012 20:58, Roger Dingledine wrote: We've lined up our first funder (BBG, aka http://www.voanews.com/), and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can. They want to sponsor 125+ fast exits. From what I understand, the reimbursement process is blocking on legal/contractual issues Andrew has to figure out first. The German Wau Holland Stiftung (WHS) [1] has agreed to channel donations towards exit operators, both for organizations and individuals. Amongst other things, this will offset load from Torproject to have it further focus on development, and allow for easy wire transfers within European borders. I think a good approach would be to call it Tor Exit Operation Rewards Program (or something). I don't know what TPO's or WHS's stance is on this, but for media purposes, we could also make it be a thing that WHS offers, not TPO? A relay operator who would be eligible for rewards, but does not want to take the money can 'donate' it to WHS instead for the specific purpose of having it used for exit bandwidth by other community members. Let me summarize the reactions to Rogers blog post in July [2] and the/this tor-relays thread [3]. Some of the comments on the blog post were not very welcoming of the whole idea. That was to be expected, given the initial money comes from CIA's propaganda outlet. The feedback on tor-relays was positive. No big objections to the idea in general. Conversation derailed into how much the actual costs for operating exits are. Some overloading of the term fast exit happened, and all tools mentioned below use the same definition (95+ Mbit/s configured bandwidth rate, 5000+ KB/s advertised bw capacity, exits to ports 80,443,554,1755, at most 2 relays per /24). Being a fast relay based on that definition can be seen as a basic requirement for a reward. https://compass.torproject.org/ lists fast exits and almost fast exits. https://metrics.torproject.org/fast-exits.html has nice graphs on development of such relays over time. We might want to add additional caveats, to avoid too many exits at one AS, for example, and other diversity criteria mentioned in Rogers initial post. There hasn't been much feedback on that so far. If we decide whether someone can become part of the rewards program on a per-case basis and not only on a given set of hard criteria -- since we want good relationships with the operators and sustainable growth -- that might entail in hate speech and what not, so maybe we should have more strict (but fair) limits like not more than X relays per AS and not more than Y relays per country, and also not more than Z relays per operator. Thoughts on how we can make this as fair as possible? I wrote a small incapable script [4] that visualizes how often a relay is a fast relay over time. In its current form, it is not very helpful, but slightly modified to output monthly overviews or just a percentage figure per relay, it might already be good enough to define when a reward is granted (after it became part of the rewards program) and when/if the operator needs to do additional explaining of downtimes etc. Feedback and patches welcome. A good suggestion was to get the word out to hackerspaces to find (A) organizations that already exist that (B) consist of people who (my opinion) should be aligned to the goals of Tor. I have been reaching out to hackerspaces all along, but I will try to do so in larger scale once we have a defined reimbursement process. I have tried to lobby the CCC to suggest to its chapters to have a simple checkbox on member registration forms towards running Tor exits, and then either the local space would start a new exit or pass the money upstream to CCC eV or WHS. On July 27th, 2012 Anonymous said [blog comment]: Pay someone who answers all abuse complaints for Tor funded exit nodes in a timely manner. The individual running an exit node would be the technical contact and all complaints would be handled by the sole abuse contact. This would take some burden from the operators and the answers to complaints would be consistent. This person could also answer inquiries about Tor in a professional manner fostering public relations. I don't think that's a bad idea. We could offer people to list ab...@torservers.net as abuse contact for their exits. Answering them is already my duty, and if this is something TPO likes I could see me doing the additional load for other relays as well. I don't think there are any legal implications of doing so; the operator would remain technical contact. All in all, the questions Roger raised in his original post are still interesting to discuss. See [4]. [1] http://www.wauland.de/ [2] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/turning-funding-more-exit-relays [3] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-July/thread.html#1433 [4] https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-November/001725.html -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ signature.asc
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Fri, 27 Jul 2012 01:23:57 -0400 grarpamp grarp...@gmail.com wrote: 4) What exactly do we mean by diversity? I would look at this almost entirely from a jurisdictional and ISP level. I believe the biggest sudden impact threats to the tor network are going to be from legal changes (jurisdictional, i.e. save the children, nullroute the nodes) and local business policy changes (sorry tor customers, no more tor egress from our DC due to complaints). I'm not sure which thread I mentioned this on so I'll put it here to be sure. I think one main thing needed is a project to catalog all the current exits as to their diversity... Box: ISP/hoster, AS, datacenter, country, upstream AS/Tier-n path, relay-operator Relay-operator: country Without that, seems like placing nodes amounts to, 'Well, we don't have any in Iran, let's go there'. If it turns out that IP is more or less fed as a courtesy from UAE across the gulf, there's not much gain. Repeat analysis for any of the above parameters. More nodes are probably good, just not all as USA, Equinix, Level3, with whatever hoster has a rack in all the DC's. I agree completely. But I would also like to add that, aside from Brasil, most of South America is still dark. Central America is not much better either. Many of those states are not especially cooperative with each other, politically speaking, yet they all need the benefits of commerce associated with the Internet. That combination strikes me as beneficial to placement of tor relays in as many of those countries as possible. Much of Africa may be worth closer examination for the same reasons. We really need to keep political diversity in view, especially given the large fractions of the tor network currently concentrated inside a mere handful of politically allied states. The Dictator of the U.S., for example, has already made the threat of shutting down the entire U.S. portion of the Internet, including relaying between other countries, which would certainly have a severely disruptive effect upon tor users all around the globe were it to happen under today's distribution of tor relays. Even more drastic would be if any of, for example, the U.K., France, Germany, or the Netherlands were to follow suit. Having countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador more tor-populated looks to me like a good thing. Another point I'd like to make is that I don't see why having one 100 MB/s relay is somehow better than having ten 10 MB/s relays or 20 5 MB/s relays. The superhigh-speed relays push operating system limits on the number of connections. Due to tor's design, distributing the workload of such relays across multiple CPU cores is problematic. Olaf Selke got around that problem by running four nodes on a quad-core machine with two IP addresses, but that meant that each node usually ran at less than 15 MB/s. For a superfast setup today, it might mean running multiple 25 MB/s nodes in similar fashion to what Olaf did, rather than a single 100 MB/s node. The benefit to tor users would seem to me to be the same either way, but the multinode method would not satisfy the demand of the funding source, as I understood it. Either way, though, the operating system limits may place keep a lid on the actual tor capacity of a very fast setup. From an infrastructure standpoint, I acknowledge that there can be problems in setting up really fast relays in Latin American countries. However, adding a few relays on the order of 500 - 5,000 KB/s in each Latin American country could probably be done, even if it meant they could only be set up in national capitals, which are mostly megalopolises of several million people, and might involve making special arrangements with the ISPs. Other major cities in some countries may also have the infrastructure to make moderately fast relays possible. Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * ** * A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army. * *-- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * ** ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 18:51:35 -0400 Steve Snyder swsny...@snydernet.net allegedly wrote: Allowing exits from ports 80 and 443 will always carry the risk of abuse complaints. It would be better to retain 80 and 443 as exit ports and just block traffic to the Google/Yahoo/AOL/etc. mail servers but I don't how that could be done with their respective load-balancing schemes. IP address based policy is tricky to use when large systems can use wide address ranges. And these addresses change over time. Question for tor developers. How hard would it be to change the logic (and syntax) of exit policy in tor to allow domain based formulations like: reject *.gmail.com reject *aol.com etc. Mick - blog: baldric.net fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 Note that I have recently upgraded my GPG key see: http://baldric.net/2012/07/20/gpg-key-upgrade/ - signature.asc Description: PGP signature ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On 31.07.2012 12:21, mick wrote: Question for tor developers. How hard would it be to change the logic (and syntax) of exit policy in tor to allow domain based formulations like: reject *.gmail.com reject *aol.com We see webmail based spam reports from all kinds of addresses. The better approach is to use ISPs that don't get upset by such reports. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hi Roger, On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 02:58:54PM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote: Open questions we need to decide about: 1) What exactly would we pay for? I think the right way to do it is to offer to reimburse bandwidth/hosting costs -- I don't want to get into the business of paying people to run relays, and I don't want people to be trying to figure out how to profit. That leads to all sorts of horrible incentive structures. You might also consider matching operator investment in a relay (similar to employer charity donation matching programs that exist in the States). I would continue to be willing to contribute my own money even with sponsor dollars, but with matching my relay would be able to take more advantage of the economics of scale. In addition, if the funding suddenly dries up, the exit node doesn't immediately die, it just goes back to the original capacity I'm comfortable funding myself. \t ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 06:32:30PM +0200, Julian Wissmann wrote: we've got an offer for 10GBit unmetered@750?, which is kind of sweet spot performance/buck wise and I guess, that it could handle 8-12 Tor nodes performance wise to satisfy the pipe. It would be a large number of high performance nodes run by just one operator, though, so I'm unsure if it really is that great idea :-( I think 10gbit is too big for the current Tor network. The total bandwidth of the network is something like 24gbit currently: https://metrics.torproject.org/network.html#bandwidth and it's more like 10gbit if you just count exits. So it makes sense to get a bunch of 1gbit spots (to offset the couple of 1gbit spots we have already), but I think 10gbit would make things too uneven at this point. --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 12:01:13PM -0400, Steve Snyder wrote: At the same time, much of our performance improvement comes from better load balancing -- that is, concentrating traffic on the relays that can handle it better. The result though is a direct tradeoff with relay diversity: on today's network, clients choose one of the fastest 5 exit relays around 25-30% of the time, and 80% of their choices come from a pool of 40-50 relays. From what I see on the TorStatus pages (torstatus.all.de, blutmagie.de) about a third of the roughly 3000 relays listed are at or below 64KB/sec of demonstrated bandwidth. No doubt some of these are soon-to-be-high-bandwidth servers that are just ramping up, and some are nodes having transitory networking problems. It seems reasonable to assume, though, that most of these low-bandwidth nodes are intentionally low-bandwidth, perhaps on the basis of the Tor doc stating a 20KB/sec minimum. Yep. Note that I raised the minimum to 30KB/s a year or so back: https://www.torproject.org/docs/tor-doc-relay Here are the current cutoffs for flags from moria1's perspective: Jul 31 18:50:01.000 [info] Cutoffs: For Stable, 656736 sec uptime, 509452 sec MTBF. For Fast: 32768 bytes/sec. For Guard: WFU 94.512%, time-known 691200 sec, and bandwidth 128000 or 133912 bytes/sec. Meaning if you don't have 32KB/s advertised in your relay descriptor, you won't get the Fast flag and most clients will ignore you. With 80% of their choices come from a pool of 40-50 relays that leaves a 20% chance for the remaining 2950 nodes. A case for low-bandwidth nodes can be made as a means to dissuade anticipated routing (due to pool size), but it seems from the stats quoted above that there is little chance that 2000+ of these 3000 nodes will ever carry Tor traffic, and thus can be ignored for purposes of traffic analysis. You're using the wrong numbers (the 40-50 relays are just for the exit position, and there are only ~920 relays with the Exit flag), but your point is right. Karsten made this graphic earlier to show that the top 50 exits account for 78.9% of the exit weights: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/attachment/ticket/6443/exit-proportions.png Is there any justification for a low-bandwidth Tor node? We could imagine alternate designs like Mashael's multipath design that spreads Tor flows across multiple circuits: http://www.cacr.math.uwaterloo.ca/techreports/2011/cacr2011-29.pdf But currently, no, tiny nodes are not particularly helpful. There's an open research question as to whether they even hurt. Or more specifically, what the performance curve looks like if we dump the X% slowest relays: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/1854 I had originally imagined doing network simulations with Shadow or Experimentor to help answer #1854, but it's proving particularly tough to get an accurate network model at that level: https://shadow.cs.umn.edu/about/papers/tormodel-cset2012.pdf And if so, what is the practical minimum bandwidth needed to actually see any traffic? Actually, even these tiny relays see traffic. That's because of the sheer number of Tor clients out there -- if enough clients make enough circuits, some of them will be through the small relays. The question is whether the bandwidth cap on them makes that circuit especially no fun to use, relative to what you'd get if we squeezed all the users onto a smaller number of higher-bandwidth relays. My guess is raising the min bw for the Fast flag to 50KB or even 100KB would reduce the variance in torperf performance: https://metrics.torproject.org/performance.html?graph=torperfsource=moriafilesize=1mb#torperf --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 07:34:14PM +0100, mick wrote: We've lined up our first funder (BBG, aka http://www.voanews.com/), and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can. They want to sponsor 125+ fast exits. Forgive me, but what do they want in return? (He who pays the piper...) Part of BBG's job is to make sure that everybody in the world can reach their content for Voice of America, Persian News Network, etc. Certain countries censor those websites, so they need tools like Tor that let people reach their websites anyway. The individuals we're working with at BBG are sympathetic to the notion that security is an important component of circumvention: https://svn.torproject.org/svn/projects/articles/circumvention-features.html But when centralized-design tools like Ultrasurf put all their energy into performance and little into security: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/ultrasurf-definitive-review this disparity in performance overshadows the disparity in security, making it harder for them to justify recommending Tor. So they want to make the Tor network more pleasant for their users. So long as we don't lose track of the fact that anonymity loves company (we need Tor to work well for all sorts of users in all sorts of locations), it's a great match. --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Fri, Jul 27, 2012 at 05:49:34AM -0400, Motoko Kusanagi wrote: I am very interested in running 100 Mbit (maybe even more) exit nodes at 100$/month, however, a question immediately comes to mind: When we say 100Mbit exit node, do we imply really unmetered traffic at 100 Mbit, or do we mean semi-reasonable traffic limit at 100Mbit speed. Really unlimited, in my experience, oftentimes turns out to be somewhat problematic. I don't think we necessarily need to have the 100mbit all to ourselves (see the other discussions here about shared connections), but I think it needs to be able to push a good fraction of 100mbit throughout the month. So something that can handle 20-30TB/mo is in the right ballpark. Note that many of our current 100mbit nodes are actually gbit nodes that try to limit themselves to a long-term average (95th percentile) of 100mbit. I could arrange for 50-100 100Mbit exit nodes running 24/7, with a traffic limit somewhere between 1 and 4 terabytes (will need to scrutinize my current contract and do some math). Arranging for such a number of honestly unlimited traffic at 100Mbit speed would be...significantly more problematic. 4TB/mo is good for a 10mbit connection, but not good for a 100mbit connection. You'll end up either needing to hibernate for 80% of the month, or rate limit your relays down a lot. That said, we don't need 50-100 100mbit exit relays from any single group. Just 5-10 would be nice. Maybe that makes the capacity issue easier? --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Is there any justification for a low-bandwidth Tor node? Other than the diversity of having more nodes around... seems from discussions here that slower nodes see less users. Which means they're not as likely to be blocked by content providers for user misbehavior. This can be valuable for the legit users who manually pick slower nodes to see if they can get through. ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On 24.07.2012 00:09, Roger Dingledine wrote: - What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth do you get for that? 109 Euro for Gbit in Romania (Voxility/Limehost) $400 each for Gbit in Budapest and USA (Axigy)* 300 Euro for 200 Mbps in Sweden 375 Euro for 200TB (~800 Mbps) in Netherlands (NForce) *) currently down, should be back up within the next two months - Is it a stable hosting situation? For example, how do they handle abuse complaints so far? All good. - Is your hosting situation one where it could make sense for us to reimburse your bandwidth costs? (Some people have a deal through their employer, friend, etc where they don't pay for hosting.) Totally. - Are you in a position to get more bandwidth if you pay more? At what rates? We're most interested in sponsoring =100mbit relays. Yes, at likely the same rates. - Do you have other locations in mind where you would run another exit relay if you didn't have to pay for it? At the moment: No. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On 30.07.2012 12:57, Andreas Fink wrote: 109 Euro for Gbit in Romania (Voxility/Limehost) $400 each for Gbit in Budapest and USA (Axigy)* 300 Euro for 200 Mbps in Sweden 375 Euro for 200TB (~800 Mbps) in Netherlands (NForce) You have to well differentiate here if you get shared traffic or dedicated one. I don't know how they do it, but we get 600-800 Mbps constantly since properly configuring the nodes at Limehost. Axigy provides dedicated Gbit at that price to us as sponsorship - same for NForce (actually their deal is 2x100TB outbound, inbound free). In othe rwords if you pay 109€ for 1GBit you are unlikely able fill that gigabit 95% of the time. See http://voxility1.torservers.net/vnstat_d.png and http://voxility1.torservers.net/vnstat.png (pretty constant daily pattern) In international wholesale, prices per megabit range from 1€ - 50€ depending on location. That's why we go with ISPs who do a mixed calculation. Say, one in ten customers uses the full Gbit. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
True but then you are simply using empty capacity of the others which is not guaranteed to you. So if the other customers start pumping your connection speed drops. Not necessarily if we are on a dedicated Gbit port (which we are at least at Axigy) and the ISP has enough upstream capacity. Limehost now only offers best effort shared Gbit. Back when we ordered our server, it clearly said dedicated Gbit. Also, we don't really care as the deals have already paid out. We only make monthly contracts so we can easily move in case something happens. There's no reason to pay extra just because. My strategy was to go through web hosting forums and pick out very cheap ISPs. FDCservers for example claims to give away enterprise 10Gbit, dedicated port for $599 at the moment. Who cares if it's just 2Gbps in the end. It's still a great deal. We have been kicked from FDC in the past and they don't have RIPE IPs so we're not going after that deal - it might still be good for running some fast non-exit relays. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
This seems (to me) like an obvious suggestion, so my apologies if it's already been thought up. Why not establish a team/scoreboard system, like those used for distributed computing and BitCoin mining? This elegantly solves a few problems while with minimal resource commitment from the Tor organization. Most importantly, it's a way to pump money into the system without ruining the current atmosphere. Sponsors could easily buy some bandwidth or people can also just donate their own connections and join a particular team. The scoreboard is based on goodwill, not dollars spent. It also eliminates the hassle of setting prices, as teams can compete for dollars and bandwidth provided, essentially setting their own prices. The org could also setup a payment system, like we-pay, that the team admins can configure to deposit funds. It could be set as a proof of work system, paying after the bandwidth has been provided. This also allows a degree of control to prevent abuse from admins trying to juice stats by abusing some network infrastructure, like dummy trial accounts on hosting sites. A group admin could block specific hosts or the Tor project could remove an entire group. Finally, this could allow for the Tor project to create metrics based on things other than speed, akin to how Folding@home scores GPU and CPU contributions differently. Then the project can set anonymity goals for the network (such as location, ISP, backbone provider, etc) and the volunteers will adjust their patterns accordingly. Finally, I would like to strongly suggest taking a cut of all donations to pay for the new infrastructure and Tor research and development. I wouldn't want development to slow on Tor because donations are going to bandwidth instead. Indeed, I would prefer we spend a ton of money on the stenography efforts and usability. Anyway, thanks for the hard work! -Zach Lym ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
If I may be allowed to add my 2cents as a newbie... Just found the website https://torstatus.blutmagie.de Linked off the https://www.torservers.net site. If this is reliable, then stats would be easy to determine.List the say...top 5(random number) of each country and support them? If a particular country does not have the min 5 then run a contest... As other exit nodes reach a milestone in say...uptime + Bandwidth + Location , they are added to the support list. This gives a goal for node operators to reach, and tells you they are good system admins and should be taken care of. A secondary with the top 5 idea After the top 5 are taken care of, if there is money left over, a voting system could be put into place where the community could vote on which node to donate to OR the ability to earmark their donations to particular nodes. On 07/29/2012 09:25 PM, Zac Lym wrote: This seems (to me) like an obvious suggestion, so my apologies if it's already been thought up. Why not establish a team/scoreboard system, like those used for distributed computing and BitCoin mining? This elegantly solves a few problems while with minimal resource commitment from the Tor organization.Most importantly, it's a way to pump money into the system without ruining the current atmosphere. Sponsors could easily buy some bandwidth or people can also just donate their own connections and join a particular team. The scoreboard is based on goodwill, not dollars spent.It also eliminates the hassle of setting prices, as teams can compete for dollars and bandwidth provided, essentially setting their own prices. The org could also setup a payment system, like we-pay, that the team admins can configure to deposit funds. It could be set as a proof of work system, paying after the bandwidth has been provided. This also allows a degree of control to prevent abuse from admins trying to juice stats by abusing some network infrastructure, like dummy trial accounts on hosting sites. A group admin could block specific hosts or the Tor project could remove an entire group. Finally, this could allow for the Tor project to create metrics based on things other than speed, akin to how Folding@home scores GPU and CPU contributions differently. Then the project can set anonymity goals for the network (such as location, ISP, backbone provider, etc) and the volunteers will adjust their patterns accordingly. Finally, I would like to strongly suggest taking a cut of all donations to pay for the new infrastructure and Tor research and development. I wouldn't want development to slow on Tor because donations are going to bandwidth instead. Indeed, I would prefer we spend a ton of money on the stenography efforts and usability. Anyway, thanks for the hard work! -Zach Lym ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 11:48:16PM -0700, Sriakhil Gogineni wrote: Ball park quotes we got were 99$ / 100 Mbps or $599 / 1000 Mbps for transit for a single 1U... we'll see if we can get something better... That's a good quote for 1Gbps. Would this be helpful / viable option for a Tor exit node ? Yes. I also had just one question: what are the specs required for a Tor node? It does not seem too resource intensive but I have not been able to find any minimum system requirements. Would a current / last-generation quad core with 8GB + would suffice? A quad-core Xeon X3350 at 2.66 GHz can easily push 500 Mbps of Tor throughput (500 Mbps up, 500 Mbps down). CPU is a fairly limiting factor. Having AES-NI is a benefit. 8GB RAM is reasonable; there's no reason to have more, but less is a tight squeeze. -andy ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hi, What can I say that hasn't been said by others before... :) We are in contact with reliable ISPs with endpoints in various countries. They would be willing to cooperate on exits at these locations. We have not yet talked about prices. I would say we (as in Torservers.net) are in the position to run multiple Gbit/s servers for prices at below $1/Mbit at not your typical ISP. In theory, we would be able to fulfill the 12.5 Gbit/s alone. We're about to test a 10Gbit uplink with a Xeon behind it to find out how far we can push a single server. That said, we should discuss and come up with a good organizational structure to reimburse people. Personally, I would only sponsor 100 Mbit/s or more (or maybe even only Gbit). I would set up a template that asks for ISP information, so we can reject too many exits at one place (say, a maximum of 1 Gbit/s or even one server per datacenter?). Do you plan on reimbursing up front for a longer period, or only after? We would likely need the money up front at least on a monthly basis. Another option we have that might be more convenient is to decide on the twelve/thirteen server locations up front and then ask the community to fill the slots. Given that there are places where you get Gbit for around or less than $500, we could use the extra money to fund some slower locations. I would very much like to see a high-bandwidth Iceland exit. The last quote I got was 500 Euro for 200 Mbit/s (including hardware) at Advania/ThorDC. -- Moritz Bartl https://www.torservers.net/ ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:08:05 +0200 Andreas Fink af...@datacell.com wrote: Traffic from Iceland is still relatively expensive. However we could host some machines in other places where we interconnect on internet exchanges. Is this true for IPv6 too? I've found asking for IPv6-only servers is almost free, because ISPs are trying to justify their investment of IPv6-capable equipment. And having a customer run IPv6 without needing IPv4 address space is a unicorn. -- Andrew http://tpo.is/contact pgp 0x6B4D6475 ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Excuse me, as I'm rather new to mailing lists an the sort, but I've been tailing the conversation on and off the last few days. I'm currently using Secured Servers through PheonixNAP as my dedicated provider. I've used them for roughly a year now and have had no real problems. They are located in Pheonix, Arizona. Bandwidth through them is relatively cheap. I'm paying $25/month for a 1Gbps line with 15TB of bandwidth. $10 for the 1Gbps line itself, then $1/TB of bandwidth I need per month. The overall cost of my server is around $170/month. It is a quad core Xeon E3-1270 with 16GB of RAM and a 2TB hard disk. It's obviously not just for a Tor relay, but it is more than powerful enough to run one. I had contacted one of my techs twice in the past and asked for confirmation that they would not have any problems with me running a Tor exit node on my server. I explained what Tor was, and explained what running an exit node would likely entail. They stated that they would not have a problem with it unless it caused a large amount of abuse reports in a short time span, and if it did, they would simply ask me to take it offline or take steps to reduce the rate of abuse reports, but he said it would likely not be a problem as long as I was not hosting anything illegal myself. I have not talked to them regarding a SWIP on my IP range, but they seem like they might be willing to at least negotiate. They had no problems setting me up with Microsoft's JMRP (Junk Mail Reporting Program), which forwards all Hotmail/MSN abuse complaints to me personally. Regardless, they're one of the most affordable dedicated hosting providers I've used, and I'm quite happy with their service. They may be a viable option for running TOR Relays, but I cannot 100% guarantee they will have no problems with it. It may be worth calling or e-mailing them yourselves to inquire further. (If you don't mind me sending my affiliate link and using it if you decide to purchase from them, it would be greatly appreciated,) http://www.securedservers.com/396.html Regular links to SecuredServers/PheonixNAP, http://www.securedservers.com/ http://www.securedservers.com/index.php http://www.phoenixnap.com/ On 07/26/2012 08:23 PM, Name Withheld wrote: 1) What exactly would we pay for? Agree on 100+ mbps exit node funding. Also agree with Moritz's suggestion that there be a form that limits fund disbursement on a per-ISP level, to encourage ISP diversity (and contribute to the discovery of new known good ISPs for tor). *Continued* funding should be contingent on *simple* review requirements (e.g. node must be up and passing decent traffic during period, fund recipient must document experience with ISP on GoodBadISP wiki page, etc) without making it a paperwork nightmare. 2) Should we fund existing relays or new ones? Difficult question. Would say allow both, with the agreement that anyone those running existing relays agree to improve service in some way (increase monthly b/w cap, set up an additional node [even if it's a small vps that doesn't require the amount of money funded], etc). This would allow our big important providers to offset some of their existing costs while still expanding the network (even if it's in nominal terms in limited circumstances). If there's suspected abuse, run a annual/semiannual funding review, but I imagine those gaming the system are more likely to be small players than the larger, established providers who were running nodes without any help. 4) What exactly do we mean by diversity? I would look at this almost entirely from a jurisdictional and ISP level. I believe the biggest sudden impact threats to the tor network are going to be from legal changes (jurisdictional, i.e. save the children, nullroute the nodes) and local business policy changes (sorry tor customers, no more tor egress from our DC due to complaints). Other threats are more likely to occur slowly, requiring less focus on pre-planning. 5) How much should an exit relay cost? $150/mo minimum. I pay roughly $130/mo with limehost/voxility, and they're almost the cheapest physical servers bandwidth to be had on the internet. Western Europe, US, Asian locations are going to be more expensive for a quality provider. Perhaps offer different funding amounts based on the ISP's region? Also, review funding minimums and maximums every 3-6 months -- I think that as VPS providers become more competitive and reliable for tor purposes (i.e. losing the metering), this is going to could change very favorably. 6) How exactly should we choose which exit relay operators to reimburse? I think history is a good metric for determining how successfully an operator will be in setting up a new node. If you get money to one of a the major operators on the condition of setting up a new node, I don't think they will have trouble setting up a new node. If you
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 02:36:32AM +, k...@damnfbi.tk wrote: Hey all, Has anyone contemplated pitching this towards hackerspaces running their own fast nodes? I wouldn't recommend running an exit node on a network link that will make you sad if it goes away for a few days. Most hackerspaces would be very sad without Internet, and shut off the account is a common ISP response to even fairly small amounts of abuse traffic. While most have a decent connection to support their space and users I'm sure it would pair well and also allow them to supplement their meager income. I didn't get the impression from Roger's email that profit is part of the equation. The purpose of the proposed funding is to defray costs; most hackerspaces that run exit nodes run them at break-even with donations, not even counting the value of the volunteer time needed to run the node. That would probably continue with the proposed funding. -andy ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hi Roger, list I want to draw your attention to a thread I've started on the tor-relays list: https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2012-July/001433.html In short, we have a funder who wants to sponsor more and faster Tor exits, and we're brainstorming about how to use the money in a way that makes the network stronger but also doesn't screw up the community side of the Tor relay operator community. The first step is collecting facts about the current fast Tor exit relays. Awesome! It would be great if you could join the conversation and give us your perspective (either on the tor-relays list or in private, whichever you prefer). I really want to make sure the current relay operators are included in the decisions. Also, if you are interested in sharing, it would be great to learn (separated by exit relay if you run more than one): - What do you currently pay for hosting/bandwidth, and how much bandwidth do you get for that? This differs a lot, please all keep in mind, that we get supported by some of our hosters through cheaper pricing, etc. I'll try to point that out. nforce.nl 565€ for 100TB outbound traffic on GBit, inbound is free and a second node sponsored by them. 2 Tor nodes running on each axigy $199 for unmetered GBit (currently down due to law enforcement). This price is half of their regular rate. limehost/voxility 104€ for unmetered, shared GBit Three Tor nodes running on it Our 100mbit nodes are actually all sponsored. One by psilo.fr, four by defaultroute.net - Is it a stable hosting situation? For example, how do they handle abuse complaints so far? We currently only use hosters, that SWIP IPs to us, as we've not made good experiences otherwise. All of our current hosters are very tolerant when it comes to abuses and can be considered stable (not counting in technical difficulties that we've had with one node). - Is your hosting situation one where it could make sense for us to reimburse your bandwidth costs? (Some people have a deal through their employer, friend, etc where they don't pay for hosting.) For some of our nodes it would make sense, for others not so much. The problem we face as a non profit is, that while we get lots of donations not all of them (and especially not the larger ones, as those usually are one-time) are plannable. So essentially this would be a great opportunity for us (assumibg, that this would run uninterrupted for more than a year) to get a larger amount of long term plannable funding. - Are you in a position to get more bandwidth if you pay more? At what rates? We're most interested in sponsoring =100mbit relays. Depends on what you mean. In the sense of getting more servers: Yes, definitely. For the sake of diversity it is hard to estimate, though, as nearly every ISP has a different pricing and different reliability. It would probably be hard to find another hoster in the limehost/voxility pricerange, but I think that somewhere in between axigy and nforce is certainly doable for GBit, which would give 2-3 Tor nodes. - Do you have other locations in mind where you would run another exit relay if you didn't have to pay for it? Definitely. As I've mentioned in my other email, we've got an offer for 10GBit unmetered@750€, which is kind of sweet spot performance/buck wise and I guess, that it could handle 8-12 Tor nodes performance wise to satisfy the pipe. It would be a large number of high performance nodes run by just one operator, though, so I'm unsure if it really is that great idea :-( If we're not doing that we'll look into getting at least one other gbit node, though. - What else should we be asking here? :) One question, that immediately came to my mind was: How will this affect other donors? Only time will tell, I guess and I hope that people will realize, that it is just an additional incentive to get operators to run reliable, fast nodes. What about legal stuff? We haven't had legal problems, so far. We're operating out of germany and have a cool lawyer, but what about others? How do they tackle the legal situation, what about covering the financial burden, if they get in legal trouble over Tor. In other words: Do we need a Tor legal fund to go with operator funding or will the community be willing/committed/able to absorb the risks. Julian Thanks! --Roger ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 05:14:44PM -0400, Andrew Lewis wrote: $100 is not going to cut it most likely, even for only 100 mbit traffic only. Most providers are really antsy about spam/DMCA reports, and aren't willing to deal with it for that cheap. I'd suspect that you are looking at the $150-$200+ range, at least in my experience. We are a small group of people trying to setup something like torservers.net in France. We already made quite a bunch of contacts with a small amount of french ISP to ask them about hosting Tor exit relays. The list is long and we are not over yet. But here is what we know as today. We already have ruled out the three major cheap hosting providers: OVH, Gandi and Dedibox. All of them are listed as bad ISPs on GoodBadISPs as prohibiting relays in their ToS. What is fun is that exit nodes running on their french IPs still account for 2.3353% of total P_exit (out of 2.6573% for all french exit nodes). We have approached some other big commercial ISPs. It was not a formal inquiry, but they did not look very happy at the idea of hosting exit nodes. What we have found though, is that several smaller (not-for-profits or coops) ISPs would be happy to help the Tor network, provided there is a clear legal boundary. Something that our not-for-profit would create. The downside is that they are small, so the cost of their bandwidth is between a monthly 3€ and 10€ (when it is not even more) for each Mbps (95%ile). But they would stand in case of trouble. And some of them have an economic interest as using more bandwidth would lower their overall cost per Mbps. One of them is willing to sponsor some of the bandwidth, and it looks like a good place to start an initial set of nodes. But even with their sponsoring, $100/month will not cover hosting+bandwidth expenses. It might be something desirable though. If external funding does not cover all the costs, then we will have to campaign for other donations. A good habit, as it makes it more likely that at least some of the nodes would survive in case the external funding stops. -- delber pgpxY1gCb3gBz.pgp Description: PGP signature ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Am 25.07.2012 um 21:31 schrieb delber: On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 05:14:44PM -0400, Andrew Lewis wrote: $100 is not going to cut it most likely, even for only 100 mbit traffic only. Most providers are really antsy about spam/DMCA reports, and aren't willing to deal with it for that cheap. I'd suspect that you are looking at the $150-$200+ range, at least in my experience. We are a small group of people trying to setup something like torservers.net in France. We already made quite a bunch of contacts with a small amount of french ISP to ask them about hosting Tor exit relays. The list is long and we are not over yet. But here is what we know as today. Je l'aime! We already have ruled out the three major cheap hosting providers: OVH, Gandi and Dedibox. All of them are listed as bad ISPs on GoodBadISPs as prohibiting relays in their ToS. What is fun is that exit nodes running on their french IPs still account for 2.3353% of total P_exit (out of 2.6573% for all french exit nodes). You can still go do it and try... but I suppose its not a good idea, once you run a relay big enough, with a policy that is open enough. We have approached some other big commercial ISPs. It was not a formal inquiry, but they did not look very happy at the idea of hosting exit nodes. You can also take a look at our wiki at torservers.net/wiki/. There is a list of ISPs that we've been in contact with, about Tor. We only run nodes with a small number of them. Thats also on our page/wiki. And Please, document your ISP contact, so that others don't have to redo that. What we have found though, is that several smaller (not-for-profits or coops) ISPs would be happy to help the Tor network, provided there is a clear legal boundary. Something that our not-for-profit would create. The downside is that they are small, so the cost of their bandwidth is between a monthly 3€ and 10€ (when it is not even more) for each Mbps (95%ile). But they would stand in case of trouble. And some of them have an economic interest as using more bandwidth would lower their overall cost per Mbps. Cool! There are also some of those, in Germany. Check them out, too. I don't know how cool they will be about Tor, or how much money they'll charge, though. One of them is willing to sponsor some of the bandwidth, and it looks like a good place to start an initial set of nodes. But even with their sponsoring, $100/month will not cover hosting+bandwidth expenses. True, but I think that you cannot expect Torproject or its sponsor to cover all of your costs. There are many, who are willing to give money to sponsor Tor nodes and they are the ones, who make sure, that the operators stay independent and diverse by giving their money or effort. It might be something desirable though. If external funding does not cover all the costs, then we will have to campaign for other donations. A good habit, as it makes it more likely that at least some of the nodes would survive in case the external funding stops. If money to kick this off is your problem I'm sure you'll find someone who will give it to you. Without a good sole like that, torservers wouldn't exist, either. -- delber If you have any questions, or if we can help you guys in any way or want to stay in contact just write me an email at this address or julian [at] torservers.net. Would be great! slightly ot: Serez-vous au Congress cet hiver? Ce serait bien de vous y rencontrer et boire une biere ou mate. - Same applies to everyone else who will be there. Julian signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hi, On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Mike Perry mikepe...@torproject.orgwrote: Thus spake k...@damnfbi.tk (k...@damnfbi.tk): Hey all, Have you contemplated sending this over to the hackerspaces list? There exists THE list for hackerspaces? Well hot damn. Are these them: http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/ Yeah, that's the one :-) Is there a specific sub-list we should focus on? Announce? Discuss? Other? Probably the main list, possibly discuss. Also, how do we recognize reputable Hackerspaces from Sketchy bunch of d00dz who think it will be totally awesome fun to pwn a bunch of Tor users? Should we check for previous reliable Tor relays from them? Should we just not care? It's funny this comes up now :) I know for a fact that most Dutch hackerspaces either run a tor node, or have a member running a Tor node. Their motives have never been questioned, so why start now :) In most countries there is a foundation covering multiple hackerspaces, these are usually where you'd want to start. If you need some more contacts in the Benelux and UK area, I can lend a hand. -- Simple guidelines to happiness: Work like you don't need the money, Love like your heart has never been broken and Dance like no one can see you. ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Thus spake k...@damnfbi.tk (k...@damnfbi.tk): Hey all, Have you contemplated sending this over to the hackerspaces list? There exists THE list for hackerspaces? Well hot damn. Are these them: http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/ Is there a specific sub-list we should focus on? Announce? Discuss? Other? Also, how do we recognize reputable Hackerspaces from Sketchy bunch of d00dz who think it will be totally awesome fun to pwn a bunch of Tor users? Should we check for previous reliable Tor relays from them? Should we just not care? -- Mike Perry signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
In my short experience of running an exit relay on a cheap vps I can say. You can do this on less than 30 a month. It might not be true 100 mbit 24/7 but does that really matter? If you get enough interested parties it should balance out right? For surfing/email etc 10 mbit is plenty I think? Mine averaged around 10 mbit/s 24/7 which isn't bad for a cheap unlimited vps. Who doesn't like a fast ToR network but the reality is, those speeds are perfectly acceptable for most of what ToR users do. If for some reason you need to upload a few gigs of leaked files, than force the network to connect to one of the faster relays. (but even still there are a lot residential connections that can't utilize the full upstream bandwidth the exit offers anyway) If you lock the exit ports down, there should not be any DMCA issues with the provider and you. I never was called out for issues with spam. Forum admins who deal with spam have several ways of dealing with it. So unless someone decides to use your exit for email spam and a lot of it. I wouldn't worry about the spam shutting down any exit relays. Haven't read of that on the list yet actually. DMCA will indeed make your provider not like you. in closing, don't discredit the cheaper solutions. They do work just fine and you don't need a pocket of money to throw at something. Telling the provider what you plan on doing and educating them works wonders as well. It has for me at least. On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 3:23 AM, Nils Vogels bacardic...@gmail.com wrote: Hi, On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Mike Perry mikepe...@torproject.orgwrote: Thus spake k...@damnfbi.tk (k...@damnfbi.tk): Hey all, Have you contemplated sending this over to the hackerspaces list? There exists THE list for hackerspaces? Well hot damn. Are these them: http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/ Yeah, that's the one :-) Is there a specific sub-list we should focus on? Announce? Discuss? Other? Probably the main list, possibly discuss. Also, how do we recognize reputable Hackerspaces from Sketchy bunch of d00dz who think it will be totally awesome fun to pwn a bunch of Tor users? Should we check for previous reliable Tor relays from them? Should we just not care? It's funny this comes up now :) I know for a fact that most Dutch hackerspaces either run a tor node, or have a member running a Tor node. Their motives have never been questioned, so why start now :) In most countries there is a foundation covering multiple hackerspaces, these are usually where you'd want to start. If you need some more contacts in the Benelux and UK area, I can lend a hand. -- Simple guidelines to happiness: Work like you don't need the money, Love like your heart has never been broken and Dance like no one can see you. ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 2:58 PM, Roger Dingledine a...@mit.edu wrote: Open questions we need to decide about: 1) What exactly would we pay for? As you said, reimbursing users for hosting is probably the best idea here, however, we also don't want to get in the situation where users feel that they _must_ be reimbursed to run an exit relay. What happens if the sponsors funding dries up in a year and no one wants to donate bandwidth anymore? Perhaps only registered companies should be sponsored — as much as I hate to limit the scope of the project, I think this (might) prevent abuse to a certain extent. Individuals who wanted to run an exit relay of their own could still do so, they would just have to use some of the money to form an LLC (or whatever their countries equivalent is if the scope of this project extends outside of the US). This gives them a bit more of an incentive to separate their Tor node form their personal server/computing resources (in the form of limited liability), which they should probably be doing anyways. I think we should aim to constrain ourselves to talking about =100mbit exits I disagree; as others have said, lots of 10mbit relays will do as much for the network as a few 100mbit relays. Most peoples use case is simply checking email, browsing the web, reading news, etc. which don't necessarily need a huge 100mbit relay. 2) Should we fund existing relays or new ones? It's probably not wise to distinguish between the two. If you only fund new relays, you may see a lot of old relays shut down (and then restarted as new relays to get funding). So you might as well just sponsor both. More thoughts on this in a bit. - Should we prefer big collectives like torservers, noisetor, CCC, dfri.se, and riseup (which can get great bulk rates on bandwidth and are big enough to have relationships with local lawyers and ISPs), or should we prefer individuals since they maximize our operator diversity? I think explore both approaches is a fine first plan. Explore both approaches sounds good; I think we'll find that operator diversity leads to a healthier (more anonymous) network. Again, I lean towards small guys that will run a few nodes at different data centers, but not Sole proprietorship's. - For existing relays who pay for hosting… Picking a certain monthly transfer target might solve this; so existing relays that are fast could apply for aid, and it would give slower relays incentive to speed up. The challenge then becomes, where do we set this cutoff? I'm inclined to think it could be kept relatively low and still be very beneficial for the network. the Tor network must not end up addicted to external funding. So long as everybody is running an exit relay because they want to save the world, I think we should be fine. This is the core of the entire discussion. We might also consider only funding relays in areas where we need the diversity by taking into account… There's network diversity (AS / upstream network topology), organization and operator diversity, jurisdictional (country) diversity, funding diversity, data-center diversity, and more. …this stuff. 7) How do we audit / track the sponsored relays? How should we check that your 100mbit relay is really working? What do we measure to confirm its capacity? To a first approximation I'm fine assuming that nobody is going to try to cheat (say, by colluding with an ISP to write legit-looking invoices but then just split the money). Probably better to monitor this carefully from the get-go. Sponsors like to know where their money is going, and continued funding could hinge on it. Then I'll send individual emails to exit relay operators pointing them to it and asking for their feedback Consider asking some of the faster / more stable non-exit relay operators as well. Many of these folks (myself included) have run an exit relay at one point or another and stopped—or want to run an exit but won't—because of the financial burden, or because of legal ramifications, etc. Some of them might want to run an exit relay, or change their existing nodes to exit relays if they could only get a bit of funding to help cover bandwidth and separate their personal resources / business from their exit node(s) (via a new server, or a separate business entity, etc.) Best, Sam -- Sam Whited pub 4096R/EC2C9934 SamWhited.com s...@samwhited.com 404.492.6008 ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
I am impressed with the amount of good discussion so far, in stead of the ' mine is better than yours ' syndrome or ' i know more than you ' . Along with what has been discussed and beginning proposals so far, in the infancy here, What about finding a way, if not to much of a headache, trying to utilize some of the exit relays we already have that their allocated bandwidth is not being used now. I know their are some factor that need to be considered, and the latest is the balancing that was recently incorporated into the Tor system, which was brought up in earlier threads. It would be nice for those people that already have a server running, that have the sources to be able to use more of their bandwidth. I can only speak for my self here, but I know that I had hoped that when I started a exit relay, that more of my bandwidth would be used. Which at the present on a dedicated server is at very minimal usage.. Just food for thought :) Jon ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hi, I am not in the position to comment on what would be good for the network, there are others more knowledgeable - like yourself. There's not much to add to your remarks. Having said that, I can comment on what I would change for me. I am currently providing a fast exit node on a colocated server I already was running. It's using spare traffic and bandwidth. Current limitations are based on the policy use anything that's left, as long as it doesn't cost me any bucks. I am more than happy to spend time and effort in running relays, but I don't have the budget to pay for more. 2) Should we fund existing relays or new ones? I would be able to help out with both. For me there would be at least three scenario's. 1) If there's reimbursement for (additional traffic on) existing relays, I would be able to add more traffic a month on my current relay. I would increase the limits on bandwidth and traffic. That way, an existing relay would be able to do more traffic. 2) If there's reimbursement for everything that is needed to run a relay, I would be able to add a new server. I would find other ISP's that sell VPS's or, when I would be able to get a new box, I could add another one at my current ISP. That way, a new relay would be added. 3) If there's reimbursement for even more, I would set up a non-proft foundation running multiple nodes. These nodes would ideally be spread amongst a couple of ISP's. That way, I would be able to add a couple of new relays. More generally, we need to consider sustainability. Our current exit relay funding is for a period of 12 months, and while there's reason to think we will find continued support, the Tor network must not end up addicted to external funding. So long as everybody is running an exit relay because they want to save the world, I think we should be fine. Given the above scenario's the sustainability largely depends on the scale. For example, when I would be reimbursed for the additional costs of the additional traffic, I can easily back down after 12 months. When running a foundation it would be more difficult to simply quit just because the sponsoring comes to a halt. On the other hand, a foundation would be run by multiple people, and as long as there is money to cover the costs of the relays, it would be a lot more stable than a number of smaller nodes. 7) How do we audit / track the sponsored relays? How should we check that your 100mbit relay is really working? What do we measure to confirm its capacity? To a first approximation I'm fine assuming that nobody is going to try to cheat (say, by colluding with an ISP to write legit-looking invoices but then just split the money). And what happens if there's doubt about the node someone is running? For a starter, maybe a solution would be: individuals are reimbursed a limited amount only, where larger amounts is available to legally registered foundations. -- Rejo Zenger . r...@zenger.nl . 0x21DBEFD4 . https://rejo.zenger.nl GPG encrypted e-mail preferred . +31.6.39642738 . @rejozenger signature.asc Description: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Thus spake Nils Vogels (bacardic...@gmail.com): On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Mike Perry mikepe...@torproject.orgwrote: Thus spake k...@damnfbi.tk (k...@damnfbi.tk): Hey all, Have you contemplated sending this over to the hackerspaces list? There exists THE list for hackerspaces? Well hot damn. Are these them: http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/ Also, how do we recognize reputable Hackerspaces from Sketchy bunch of d00dz who think it will be totally awesome fun to pwn a bunch of Tor users? Should we check for previous reliable Tor relays from them? Should we just not care? It's funny this comes up now :) I know for a fact that most Dutch hackerspaces either run a tor node, or have a member running a Tor node. Their motives have never been questioned, so why start now :) Yeah, I was asking a subset of Roger's parent question: Should we fund new relays by new people, fund new relays by existing community members, or fund upgrades to existing relays by existing community members? I think if we just start dumping money on total strangers who have never run Tor exits before, it is less likely to lead to a stable outcome where those exits continue to exist. In most countries there is a foundation covering multiple hackerspaces, these are usually where you'd want to start. If you need some more contacts in the Benelux and UK area, I can lend a hand. Good suggestion. I do generally agree that hackerspaces are a great untapped potential for running more Tor nodes. It is definitely something that should be explored. Not sure who (if anyone) is tasked with driving this whole exit sponsoring initiative yet, though. I also like the idea of favoring larger, better organized hackerspaces that are more likely to be able to continue to manage their exits over the long term. -- Mike Perry signature.asc Description: Digital signature ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
Re: [tor-relays] Call for discussion: turning funding into more exit relays
Hey all, Have you contemplated sending this over to the hackerspaces list? They are often: geographically diverse can be be incorporated or non-profit understand or have heard of Tor usually pay for a decently fast connection for their space already are familiar with hosting services already I'm sure being able to supplement their small income by doing something like this would interest them as well. -kupo ___ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
