[tor-relays] Exit node situation in Finland

[Juuso Lapinlampi]

I can pitch in for running the second largest exit in Finland
(wubthecaptain1). Actually, it was Juha's project that inspired me to
compete with other Finnish relays in terms of bandwidth. :)

I've operated wubthecaptain1 exit since 2016-02-02. Unfortunately the
home server supposed to host this relay died few days earlier, so it's
currently hosted on my workstation (ouch).

Before I started, the top 4 relays were all hosted on FlokiNET with very
little diversity. I was moving into a new apartment, and thanks to
Ficora pretty much every building built after 2014 or 2015 has fiber
access and 100-1000 Mbps connections (atypical).

CloudFlare CAPTCHAs kicked in about a month later, and initial symptoms
of blocked webpages appeared within a week of exit uptime. Once the
dynamic IPv4-address changes, CloudFlare CAPTCHAs are gone for a day or
two but quickly return.

I'd argue it's actually pretty difficult to get into Finnish colocation
with a good hosting provider unless you have good contacts to people
running that sort of stuff. I found it much easier to colocate in
Sweden, a bit cheaper too. Essentially I had given up on Finnish
colocation for few years due to lack of choices and contacts.

> - Running an exit node is absolutely legal

For the curious, the law is Tietoyhteiskuntakaari 7.11.2014/917, 182 §
Vastuuvapaus tiedonsiirto- ja verkkoyhteyspalveluissa.

> - ISP may cut your connection because it is listed as malware host

This happened to me within 3 days of starting the exit relay from a home
connection. I had contacted my ISP's abuse department to let them know
well in advance and to mark my subscription to be a Tor exit [1],
however they had done so for the wrong subscriber and I was accidentally
suspended. :)

I called the customer service, quickly mentioned I operate a Tor exit
as discussed and had no questions asked. He forwarded my message to the
abuse department and I was unsuspended in about 30 minutes.

> - The National Cyber Security Center Finland (NCSC-FI) is able to
> "whitelist" your IP address so the ISP does not get those automated malware
> detections

AS1759 TeliaSonera Finland Oyj seems to receive a lot of autoreporter
logs about my Tor exit. They also reminded me about it.[2] I didn't ask
the IP-address to be whitelisted, but it doesn't seem to bother my ISP.

I did attempt to request autoreporter logs to my email address, but
never received a reply from CERT-FI (NCSC-FI).

> - Sebastian Mäki got police visit because his exit node

Source (in Finnish):
http://blogi.sebastianmaki.fi/2012/12/keskusrikospoliisi-me-tultiin-tekemaan.html

As for running a very large Tor exit from my home, I am aware of that
risk and legally prepared for it. It would not be my first time getting
the police do a home search and seizure (unrelated to Tor).

> - There has been warming up phase that maybe Finnish libraries start some
> Tor activity

Care to elaborate which libraries are interested in this? I've had a
discussion with Electronic Frontier Finland members about the idea too.

[1]: https://partyvan.eu/transparency/emails/2016-01-09-teliasonera-tor-exit.mbox
[2]: https://paste.debian.net/plainh/a969ce33