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Re: [LUG] [OT] Simple peer-to-peer web censorship avoidance

 

On 10/02/14 12:19, Martijn Grooten wrote:
> Tor recommends not running exit nodes from home anyway. And they say
> you should inform your ISP(s) that you're running an exit node. I
> believe they also recommend you inform the police. 

Actually, a higher level of obfuscation is attained by running your Tor
instance as an exit node, even at home - not that necessarily makes it a
good idea mind you. The vast majority of people, including me on a
60Mbps line, just don't have the bandwidth to spare at home, legal
ramifications aside. But as for the legal ramifications, well, it's not
yet illegal to care about one's privacy and anonymity online and both
the ISP and the police can die in a fire before I'll volunteer
information such as that to them when it's not required. After all, as a
keen but amateur cook I have a nice collection of Global kitchen knives
downstairs - razor sharp, super durable molybdenum-alloy construction
and convenient non-slip grips. In the right (wrong?) hands they could be
used to cause absolute carnage and I don't have to call my ISP or the
police to register those...

> I would hope that if you are seriously suspected of having committed
> some kind of illegal activity through your Internet connection, that
> poinging the police to a Wikipedia article wouldn't be sufficient. In
> the particular case of Tor, it is relatively easy to determine if a
> certain IP address was an exit node at a given moment. So "I was
> running a Tor exit node" isn't a valid defense - unless you were
> indeed running an exit node. Martijn. 

Well it wasn't quite as laissez faire as that - the coppers had done
some homework and knew full well they'd be turning up at a corporate IT
shop with tons of server and bandwidth infrastructure and not just some
random residential address. The boss and I did sit down with them for a
lengthy and entirely friendly chat, both signed some paperwork and of
course offered our ongoing help with any further investigative
procedures they might want to go through with the warning that there
really wouldn't be much to show for it, especially as I intentionally
don't log the Tor activity. The funniest looks were really reserved for
the boss - I think they had my number as a potential malcontent/annoying
hippy almost immediately and weren't particularly surprised that I was
some kind of left-leaning anti-establishment hacker type "sticking it to
the man": what confused them was why my evidently sensible, older
conservative boss was letting me use company resources to achieve this.
Mostly because he was sensible, of course, and a lot cooler than his
balding, badly-suited initial appearance suggested.

So whilst it was perfectly amiable, the situation was definitely a
little more serious than I perhaps made it sound last time. Either way,
they still never got back to us.

Regards

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