Hello everyone!

Some of you might have noticed that there is a visible drop of relays on
our consensus-health website.[1] The reason for that is that we kicked
roughly 600 non-exit relays out of the network yesterday. In fact, only
a small fraction of them had the guard flag, so the vast majority were
middle-only relays. We don't have any evidence that these relays were
doing any attack, but there are attacks possible which relays could
perform from the middle position. Therefore, we decided we'd remove
those relays for our users' safety sake.

While we were already tracking some of the relays for a while, a big
chunk of them was also independently reported by a cypherpunk and nusenu
helped analyzing the data. Thanks to both of them from our side.

Foe what it is worth: a large part of those relays did not set any valid
contact info and/or when we tried to contact some of the relays'
operators the emails bounced. However, we sometimes need to have ways to
reach relay operators, be it for debugging purposes or for helping them
with relay misconfiguration. Thus, please set a valid contact info when
running relays.

Finally, anyone running relays: try to get connected to the community so
we can build some trust among each other. That seems to be an essential
part in our long-term strategy to fight bad relays trying to enter our
network.

Georg