[dnyberg at premier1.net: Re: The Cost of Running a Server]

[Paul Syverson]

As the most practical contribution to Tor you could make at this point
I recommend following Nick's suggestions (repeated below since it was
unclear to me if D would receive them).  As a decision about what to
do personally about your IRC situation I offer the following analogy,
which is limited as all analogies are.  It's also straying way out of
tor-ops territory so I have sent it to the wider or-talk list.

Say you frequent a nightspot, The Chat Club, where you meet all your
friends.  It's been an integral part of your regular routine for
years.  One night you are astounded to discover you are barred entry.
Upon further enquiry you discover that the establishment had
previously had problems with patrons from the Orthodox Church of
Scallions (always noticeable in their distinct Tor T-shirts) getting
drunk and starting fights.  You try to point out that even more fights
are started by others, and the relative percentage of fighting people
wearing Tor T-shirts is no higher than in the general population; it's
a tiny fraction. It's just the bright green color that makes their
activities more salient. Furthermore, you were not actually wearing a
Tor T-shirt when banned, and you're not actually in the Orthodox
Scallion Church.

Well they don't know about that; they have a rent-a-cop company who
they contract to that decides who to bounce.  So you find out that
this company lists you (correctly) as a member of the Reformed Church
of Scallions whose members all wear traditional black ZKS Freedom
T-shirts (these are all pretty geeky religions). It doesn't matter
that Reformed Scallions have all taken a vow of nonviolence and
teetotaling, and there is not a single instance of one ever being
involved in a fight in a bar. They're not interested. And, your
favorite nightspot doesn't care either.  Even though you point out
that it is trivial to instruct their bouncers to distinguish bright
green from black, it's just not worth their trouble.

So you can either quit your religion and meet your friends at The Chat
Club as you alwoys have, or you can decide your princples are too
important, and you will need to meet them elsewhere, even if there is
no one other place that they all tend to congregate regularly. You
might try to convince them all to start frequenting the place up the
street, Talkers. Even if they all agree that the Chat Club owner is
being an incredible jerk and a bigot, he does run the place where all
the cool people are and that has the best music.  Plus your friends
may be vaguely uneasy to be seen supporting a religious group they're
not actually in, even against a bigot. What do you do? Probably there
is no one answer that is the best answer for everybody in that
situation. Tough call.

aloha,
Paul
-- 
Paul Syverson                              ()  ascii ribbon campaign  
Contact info at http://www.syverson.org/   /\  against html e-mail


On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 11:09:06PM -0400, Nick Mathewson wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 10:41:03PM -0400, andrew at lewman.com wrote:
> > FYI, here was his response.
> 
> 
> You should reply one last time, and recommend the exitlist script, and
> let them know we'll give them techsupport as needed.
> 
> The exitlist script lets them block the Tor nodes that will connect
> to them, and not the middleman nodes that won't.
> 
> If they don't go for this, we'd like to know why.  If they just hate
> anonymity, there's nothing we can do about that.  If they just want
> something easier to use, they should tell us what damned interface
> they would prefer.  If they can't be bothered to answer, then at least
> we showed we could be bothered to ask.
> 
> yrs,
> -- 
> Nick Mathewson