perfect-privacy.com, Family specifications, etc.

[Scott Bennett]

     On Sun, 16 May 2010 07:08:53 +0200 Paolo Palmieri <palmaway at gmx.it>
wrote:
>>      There is someone going by the name of perfect-privacy.com who is
>> listed in the contact information of roughly 28 relays' descriptors with
>> widely varying throughput capacities in the tor directory.  These relays'
>> descriptors are grouped into quite a few separate Family specifications,
>> although some appear to be orphans without a Family.
>
>>From a quick look at Tor status, it seems to me that they are grouped
>into families based on their geographical location.

     That is true for some of them, but there are also some that are not
in any Family at all.  In any case, they all should be in a single Family.
>
>>      I would appreciate having these relays lose their "Valid" flags in
>> the consensus until such time as their operator(s) group all of them
>> into a single Family specification.  I hope the authority operators
>> will take this action in a timely fashion.  Until this situation is
>> dealt with, it will remain entirely possible that clients may build
>> circuits whose entire routes consist of perfect-privacy.com's nodes.
>
>While some of them appear to be guards, none is running as an exit node,
>so this should not be possible.
>
     Thanks for pointing that out, Paolo.  I had missed that.  However,
it should not be possible to get more than one of them in any given circuit
route, but because they are not grouped into a single Family, a circuit
could consist of all nodes except the exit node being perfect-privacy.com's
nodes.
     I note that at present nothing has been done about the bad situation
by either perfect-privacy.com or by the directory authority operators, nor
have I yet received any response to my email message to the address in the
contact info for these nodes.
     The tor man page gives a not very edifying description of the NodeFamily
statement.  The man page says that the NodeFamily statement may be used more
than once in a given torrc file.  Does each use define a different Family?
Or do all nodes listed in NodeFamily statements get lumped into a single
Family?  What effect does the NodeFamily statement have upon the use of nodes
whose descriptors already contain some Family information?  I intend to add
one or more NodeFamily lines to my torrc very shortly, but need to know
whether a) I have to include all of the nodes in a single, very long run-on
NodeFamily statement, and b) listing all of perfect-privacy.com's nodes now
would mean that encountering similar situations with nodes belong to someone
else would require grouping them with perfect-privacy.com's nodes.  Thanks
in advance for any answers to these questions!


                                  Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG
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* Internet:       bennett at cs.niu.edu                              *
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