TriNetre - Archive for January 26, 2005

(no longer updated)

An interesting tussle is building up between Tor users and Wikipedia moderators. It started with someone using a Tor router as an exit node for vandalizing Wikipedia writeups. Do read the follow-ups to the post linked in earlier sentence. In particular read the interesting follow-up by Geoffrey Goodell titled "Wikipedia Manifesto". Things are turning uglier now that Tor servers are being added to blacklist (DNSBL). The most worrying part of the DNSBL is that not only is the Tor server's IP address included, but so is the whole class C (/24) network that contains that Tor's IP address. The logic being that:

a tor server can do outgoing connections on other ips (multiple ips per host) than the server runs on. Since normally a server operates in the same class-c network we chose the listing of the entire class-c as second list type.

Earlier, there was an issue with routing of BitTorrent traffic through Tor network. Things are going to get pretty intense soon given that Tor is reaching 1.0 release state and getting good publicity. More users and servers would mean more anonymity for the Tor network, but it will also mean more attacks and problems for Tor server operators (I am one).

[Update] There is a pretty good post describing the issue at Blanu.Net.