The death of my tor exit-node - Sun, Jan 30, 2011

My TOR exit node is no more.

The ISP shut it down.  All that is left is the relay that I’ve been running forever.  This ISP was on the “Tor Friendly” list (which I altered the wiki and noted it accordingly) and allowed IRC servers.  The reason for shutting it down? One php script probe (see previous post).  One.  The boilerplate emails stating what tor was, and how nothing is logged, blah blah blah, weren’t an acceptable reason for the probe (WTF?).  I guess I am responsible for /all/ traffic that goes in and out of my box per their AUP.. Which is IRC friendly….. Yeah…  So I cancelled my service, and are looking elsewhere.

Now riddle me this.  Why would an ISP enjoy common-carrier liability protection from say, usenet or IRC, but not a tor exit node?  It doesn’t make sense to me.  I set this exit node up 100% with the guidelines setup by the tor-project (short of forming an LLC for liability protection) with regard to dns entries with webpages, a dedicated email for abuse complaints, the whole 9 yards.  Still, it was shut down.

Yeah, you may say to just run another relay, but heres the problem with tor.  Unless you’re going to a hidden node within TOR, the entire project is only as fast as the combined speed as its exit nodes.  Sure, you can hop onto tor at 400MB/sec, but the net worth of the entire network is how fast you can get OUT.  I can bounce around servers until I’m blue in the face, does me no good if I cant get to where I need to go because the exit nodes are all swamped.

The whole situation is shitty.  Its been down for a week to let my self cool off rather than right an angry post naming the ISP in question.  Oh, the tor exit node’s DNS WAS tor-exit-readme.virtual-adept.net, just in case you were curious.. 🙂

All this happening when the tor project could really use a 10 mb/sec exit node for Egypt. 🙁