[tor-project] Exit probability

[Roger Dingledine]

On Wed, Jun 29, 2016 at 09:43:59AM -0400, David Goulet wrote:
> Could we think of some outreach we could do maybe a blog post about the
> importance of location diversity in Exits? That running relays in the US is
> actually OK? or maybe just the fact that people have to stop using OVH (well
> OVH has a data center now in Montreal so NA!) or Hetzner or Linode? Or since
> Europe as a lot of countries thus multiple jurisdictions it's fine to have
> 85%? (is it really true with EU laws?)

One step that might be helpful would be doing research to find reasonable
ISPs outside Europe who are amenable to running exit relays. With some
advocacy effort, we might even find sysadmins or owners at these ISPs
who want to help out, e.g. by offering things at-cost, or by donating
some bandwidth, or some other contribution.

For example, it might be more effective to do a blog post about these
five ISPs we found who will do matching bandwidth donations for exit
relays, compared to a more generic blog post that just identifies the
problem and encourages people to fix it somehow.

There's certainly a tradeoff between focusing attention on a small
number of places, vs letting people find a huge variety of places, where
that better diversity would lead to better resiliency and also better
security for the network. But if the choice in reality is more like
"focus attention on a small number of places, or make no real progress",
then I would choose the former. :)

--Roger