[tor-talk] Koumbit re-joins the Tor privacy network, announces an easy-to-use tool for system administrators

[anarcat]

(Sorry for the communique boilerplate, but I figured it could still be
interesting here. See also the [original story][].)

 [original story]: http://www.koumbit.org/en/content/koumbit-re-joins-tor-privacy-network-announces-easy-use-tool-system-administrators

Koumbit is again part of the Tor privacy network. We provide this
service to the public in response to the increasingly pervasive
surveillance of everyone who uses the internet. We believe that there
have been inexcusable attacks on democracy and basic rights to privacy.

Tor is a tool that allows journalists, human rights activists, and
ordinary people to have some privacy in terms of the tracking of their
IP addresses, which can be used to link online activity to an individual
user identity. We believe that this type of privacy should be available
to the public. The Snowden leaks have proven however that such privacy
is being violated daily by the so-called democratic governments of the
West, including Canada.

It is our hope that this new server will help the Tor network to achieve
greater stability and speed, as the network is quickly becoming more
popular. We are joining a small group of "fast" Tor relays in Canada ,
which number [around 10][] at the moment. We encourage other hosting
providers to follow our example and to run as many Tor relays as
possible, using their spare infrastructure.

Koumbit keeps no logs of users accessing the Tor relay and is in fact
incapable of identifying users of the Tor relay, because of the nature
of the network, whose goal is to provide anonymity. More information
about the network can be found on the [relay homepage][]

 [around 10]: https://globe.torproject.org/#/search/query=&filters%5Bcountry%5D=ca&filters%5Bflag%5D=Exit
 [relay homepage]: http://tor.koumbit.net/

An easy-to-use tool for those who want to expand the Tor network: presenting the Torride live cd
================================================================================================

We spent a significant amount of time making it dead-easy for others who
want to run this service on their space servers. We now offer a disk
image that will provide a Tor relay, and can be booted from the network,
a CD or USB drive. Since it is a live filesystem, we can now offer an
additional guarantee that no data is kept on users of the server, as all
data is stored in RAM and destroyed on reboots.

We developped the Torride project before we were pointed to the
tor-ramdisk project, which is similar. However, Torride is based on a
standard Debian system and Debirf, the initramfs generation tool. It
also has less features and is simpler to build and run.

More information on the disk image, called Torride, is available on the
[project homepage][] and [the 1.1.0 release announcement][].

 [project homepage]: https://redmine.koumbit.net/projects/torride
 [the 1.1.0 release announcement]: https://redmine.koumbit.net/news/17

Previous harassment, current autonomy
=====================================

Koumbit has re-jointed the Tor network by putting its exit node back
online after a downtime of nearly 2 years. We had to shutdown the relay
due to constant harassment targeting service providers upstream from
Koumbit, mainly from big media companies' lawyers. We now have our own
IP addresses, which allow us to deal directly with this type of
complaint.

The [exit node provided by Koumbit][] qualifies as "fast," according to the
Tor project Atlas. Specifically, we will dedicate a full 100 mbps
(megabit per second), burstable to 1000 mbps, to this server. It seems
that the "fast" flag currently means 18KB/s, but I use the term to
designate much faster relays here.

The fingerprint of the server currently is:

    760EFA58F7277A86BA63BC7071DFD6CE3A079EDF

Any questions or complaints about the service can be addressed to
<support+tor at koumbit.org>.

 [exit node provided by Koumbit]: https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/760EFA58F7277A86BA63BC7071DFD6CE3A079EDF

-- 
Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial
in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead
to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
                                        - George Orwell
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