[tor-relays] Amazon abuse report

Paritesh Boyeyoko parity.boy at gmail.com
Fri Nov 1 17:48:44 UTC 2013


On Friday 01 Nov 2013 05:37:14 I wrote:
>The advice on how to manage exit problems seems to
> be very sound and Tor is defensible because it is being abused by
> torrenting also.
> 

...and this is something else I don't quite understand.  People who know about 
Tor (which obviously includes exit operators) are well aware of the stress 
that BitTorrent puts on the Tor network.

The paper http://planete.inrialpes.fr/papers/TorTraffic-NSS10.pdf shows 54.48% 
of the traffic passing through the sample exit nodes was BiTorrent traffic.

Myself and others (I'm sure) look forward to the day when the Tor network 
comprises 100,000+ 100Mb/s nodes.  However, until that time comes I would 
think that exit node operators would (wrong choice of words incoming) make 
more effort to use a whitelisted exit policy, thereby starving BitTorrent of 
bandwidth, and forcing those users away from this "free VPN".  The likes of 
Vuze (Azureus) don't help the situation by offering Tor as an option.

Would it be worth putting together selection of template Exit Policies which 
exit node operators can cut & paste into their torrc?  Or (and this is more a 
dev question) have an "include" directive where separate policy files can be 
specified (and therefore substituted), something like this:

ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/mail.exit
ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/rdp.exit
ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/web.exit
ExitPolicy include /etc/tor/chat.exit

Combine this with a default reject *:* policy and it *may* lead to a change of 
culture and squeeze BitTorrent out.  It may even help reduce the number of 
DMCA notices that exit operators get.

Thoughts?
-- 
Parity
parity.boy at gmail.com


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