On Thu, 2 Feb 2012 00:25:19 -0500 Roger Dingledine arma@mit.edu wrote:

On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 11:36:57PM -0500, Steve Snyder wrote:

...

This application claims to identify bad Tor nodes for the purpose of excluding them from use:

http://xqz3u5drneuzhaeo.onion/users/badtornodes/

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

In general it is a poor plan to change your routing strategy in a way that makes you different from most Tor users. If you change it enough, you end up making a signature for your behavior where an attacker can say "hey, that's the guy who never uses German relays". The result is that you harm your anonymity. Nobody has really researched how much harm comes from how much difference -- and we recommend against doing things that are poorly understood.

...

The sum of bad-exit-flags (8),

As far as I can tell, http://xqz3u5drneuzhaeo.onion/users/badtornodes/overview.html#blocking are all tiny relays so it doesn't much matter whether you badexit them (you're probably never going to encounter them in practice anyway).

For the question of exit relays in Iran, see https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4207 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/4923

The latter ticket's discussion section is quite interesting. After reading through it, it seems to me that the problem in Roger's point C would be best dealt with in vidalia without regard to IP address or presumed country. When asking whether the user wishes to run a relay, vidalia's dialog could include an instruction something like this:

"Before you decide to run a tor relay, please consider whether the government of the country where you live and/or would like to operate a relay might target you for any kind of abuse if that government noticed that you were running a tor relay."

As long as the people who have volunteered to provide translations for vidalia's and/or tor's textual interactions with users have sufficient skills to provide such a cautionary note in all of the most necessary languages plus two or three languages spoken widely around the world, then that should take care of the matter. I share the concerns of both Roger and Sebastian regarding undesirable potential results of automating the rejection of entire countries of relays.

Scott Bennett, Comm. ASMELG, CFIAG ********************************************************************** * Internet: bennett at cs.niu.edu * *--------------------------------------------------------------------* * "A well regulated and disciplined militia, is at all times a good * * objection to the introduction of that bane of all free governments * * -- a standing army." * * -- Gov. John Hancock, New York Journal, 28 January 1790 * **********************************************************************