Tor relays in China (was Re: Tor blocking german nodes)

[Roger Dingledine]

On Sat, Nov 24, 2007 at 01:19:33PM +0100, Marco A. Calamari wrote:
> But I strongly suggest to discuss more and warn about using the
>  600+ router from China.
> 
> Consider two facts:
> 
> 1) mout are born in few weeks
> 2) all of them are exit router, no other
>  country has more than 50%
> 
> Add them and add a very small quantity of paranoy.
> 
> German situation is that of a nation full
>  of crypto hacktivist that mus face a new
>  law in two year
> 
> China (and another country maybe) are
>  a Big Brother with certificate of authenticy.
> 
> mMybe a little press coverage on this is due.
> 
> A lot of naive Tor users think that those
>  are chinese dissidents, reallly!

I still think this is normal behavior. See e.g.
http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Sep-2007/msg00273.html
for the last time this discussion came up.

Seriously, the Vidalia interface is making it really easy these days
to become a Tor relay, and by default Vidalia relays are exit relays
(then see http://archives.seul.org/or/talk/Sep-2007/msg00287.html). From
very informal studies of what's hitting my directory cache, Germany,
US, and China make up about 20% of the Tor user base each.

So it is not surprising to me that in BlueStar's stats
(https://torstat.xenobite.eu/showstatistics.php) they represent the top
three countries by relays too.

I don't think they're Chinese dissidents. I think they're Chinese Tor
users. Most German Tor users aren't German dissidents either. Once you
start talking about hundreds of thousands of users, most of them are
just ordinary people hoping to get a bit more privacy.

Press coverage about the increasing use of Tor in China would actually
harm our goals -- right now Tor works well in China because we're not
threatening them, making them look bad in the media, etc. Let's keep it
that way as long as we can.

Thanks,
--Roger