[tor-relays] Australian relays

[neel at neelc.org]

September 16, 2018 8:30 PM, "Sydney" <sydney at riseup.net> wrote:
> I might be in a position to bring these back in 2019. Before I do, I just wanted to know if it’s
> worthwhile having the Australian relays as part of the network?

It depends.

If you want the most consensus weight, or the cheapest bandwidth, the best is in North America or Europe. Blame the economics of submarine cables.

However, this comes with one disadvantage: it makes spying on Tor users easier: governments know they need to monitor only US and Europe Internet links to spy on most of Tor because circuits are mostly trans-Atlantic.

However, if we have Tor relays in the Asia-Pacific region, even if it costs more for less bandwidth, it could make spying harder as there could be more circuits which travel from the US, France, or Germany to Japan, Singapore, or Australia instead of staying in the EU or US/Canada.

Also, encouraging more Asia-Pacific relays could eventually lead to a consensus weight node in Asia, making it fairer for Asian/AU/NZ relays. Someone in that part of the world should **really** set up a consensus weight relay so we have a fair measurement of Asia-Pacific Tor relays.

In short: If you want to make the Tor network more resilient however, non NA/EU locations are important. If you just want a higher bandwidth number, it's hard to beat Europe.

Thank You,

Neel Chauhan

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