Tor servers chained with proxies (was: A brief response on TRUTHWORTHY)

[Fabian Keil]

maillist <maillist at piirakka.com> wrote:

> > I really hate it when Tor servers are chained with squid
> > and provide modified content without letting me know.
> > Some of them even provide default addresses for failed
> > DNS requests, instead of delivering a decent error message.
> > 
> > I think most of these Tor server operators have no
> > wrong intentions and wouldn't mind using such an option
> > if it existed. I would be glad if I could easily exclude
> > them.
> 
> I'm running Tor server chained with squid to save valuable bandwidth. It
> saves about 2GB per day. No content is modified, only some error
> messages by Squid (host not found etc.) which is default behavior. I
> dont see anything wrong with that, correct me if I'm wrong.

If they are setup correctly I don't see anything wrong with proxies
either. But I expect them not to provides outdated or modified content,
not to mess with error messages and not to cache if the servers
asked them not to.

If I type an invalid address into my browser, I want to see the error
message of my local running Privoxy, not some message send by a
"transparent" proxy.

I assume that most default proxy configurations are as
broken as most default browser configurations, therefore
I'd rather exclude all Tor nodes that are chained with a
proxy, unless I know for sure that they really work
transparent.

> Many ISP:s transparently redirect http traffic to Squid to save their
> bandwidth.

If I was aware that my Tor server had no clean
web connection, I would block port 80.

> Many websites provide (sadly) provide different content depending your
> toplevel domain.

Not always to the Tor user's disadvantage. For example
Tor allows me to order RC-1 DVDs from web shops that
aren't supposed to ship them to Germany, but don't
mind if the IP check is circumvented.
 
> Do you have any examples of content that has been modified by tor server
> chained with proxy? I'm intrested.

From time to time I get custom headers that were added by squid
or some other proxy and aren't set by the original web servers.
Some people might not care, I do.

Or I mistype a URL and instead of getting a real error message 
I'm redirected to another site. In fact "redirect" isn't the
right word, because there is no 302 or 301 status code, but 200.

Sometimes it's a custom error message send with the wrong
status code, sometimes it's just another page with no content
that I'm interested in (this happend only a few times so far).

As I said before I don't think it's the result of bad intentions,
so labels like "HTTPProxy", "ModifiedContent", "ModifiedHTTPBodies"
and "ModifiedHTTPHeaders" could help.
 
> BTW: my tor server is SpongeBob.

Thanks.

Fabian
-- 
http://www.fabiankeil.de/
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