[tor-talk] [tor-relays] Exit in Turkey blocking torproject (komm EA93C), BadExit, Node Subscription Services, Censorship

[Nathaniel Suchy]

So this exit node is censored by Turkey. That means any site blocked in
Turkey is blocked on the exit. What about an exit node in China or Syria or
Iraq? They censor, should exits there be allowed? I don't think they
should. Make them relay only, (and yes that means no Guard or HSDir flags
too) situation A could happen. The odds might not be in your favor. Don't
risk that!

Cordially,
Nathaniel Suchy

On Thu, Aug 30, 2018 at 3:25 PM grarpamp <grarpamp at gmail.com> wrote:

> This particular case receiving mentions for at least a few months...
> D1E99DE1E29E05D79F0EF9E083D18229867EA93C kommissarov 185.125.33.114
>
> The relay won't [likely] be badexited because neither it nor its upstream
> is
> shown to be doing anything malicious. Simple censorship isn't enough.
> And except for such limited censorship, the nodes are otherwise fully
> useful, and provide a valuable presence inside such regions / networks.
>
> Users, in such censoring regimes, that have sucessfully connected
> to tor, already have free choice of whatever exits they wish, therefore
> such censorship is moot for them.
>
> For everyone else, and them, workarounds exist such as,,,
> https://onion.torproject.org/
> http://yz7lpwfhhzcdyc5y.onion/
> search engines, sigs, vpns, mirrors, etc
>
> Further, whatever gets added to static exitpolicy's might move out
> from underneath them or the censor, the censor may quit, or the exit
> may fail to maintain the exitpolicy's. None of which are true
> representation
> of the net, and are effectively censorship as result of operator action
> even though unintentional / delayed.
>
> Currently many regimes do limited censorship like this,
> so you'd lose all those exits too for no good reason, see...
> https://ooni.torproject.org/
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_and_surveillance_by_country
>
> And arbitrarily hamper spirits, tactics, and success of volunteer
> resistance communities and operators in, and fighting, such regimes
> around the world.
>
> And if the net goes chaotic, majority of exits will have limited
> visibility,
> for which exitpolicy / badexit are hardly manageable solutions either,
> and would end up footshooting out many partly useful yet needed
> exits as well.
>
>
> If this situation bothers users, they can use... SIGNAL NEWNYM,
> New Identity, or ExcludeExitNodes.
>
> They can also create, maintain and publish lists of whatever such
> classes of nodes they wish to determine, including various levels
> of trust, contactability, verification, ouija, etc... such that others
> can subscribe to them and Exclude at will.
> They can further publish patches to make tor automatically
> read such lists, including some modes that might narrowly exclude
> and route stream requests around just those lists of censored
> destination:exit pairings.
>
> Ref also...
> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/as:AS197328%20flag:exit
> https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#search/country:tr%20flag:exit
>
>
> In the subect situations, you'd want to show that it is in fact
> the exit itself, not its upstream, that is doing the censorship.
>
> Or that if fault can't be determined to the upstream or exit, what
> would be the plausible malicious benefit for an exit / upstream
> to block a given destination such that a badexit is warranted...
>
> a) Frustrate and divert off 0.001% of Turk users smart enough to
> use tor, chancing through tor client random exit selection of your
> blocking exit, off to one of the workarounds that you're equally
> unlikely to control and have ranked, through your exit vs one
> of the others tor has open?
>
> b) Prop up weird or otherwise secretly bad nodes on the net,
> like the hundreds of other ones out there, for which no badexit
> or diverse subscription services yet exist to qualify them?
>
> c) ???
>
> Or that some large number of topsites were censored via
> singular or small numbers of exits / upstreams so as to be
> exceedingly annoying to the network users as a whole, where
> no other environment of such / chaotic widespread annoyance
> is known to exist at the same time.
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