On 06/06/2017 01:34, MZMcBride wrote:
And Faidon posted in November 2014 about the establishment of a Tor relay: https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2014-November/079392.html
Thanks for the pointer, I did know that the WMF was operating a Tor relay but I didn't recall where to find the details.
How does your proposal interact (if at all) with the existing Tor relay set up in late 2014?
Relays (both middle relays or exit relays) and hidden services are separate parts of the Tor network, so I would say that this project does not intersect with the existing relays.
It's unclear to me whether "Tor onion service" in this context is equivalent to a Tor exit node. I'm fairly sure setting up the latter has been discussed previously on wikimedia-l and/or wikitech-l.
Can you point me towards this discussion? I wasn't able to find any reference to that.
In any case, an exit node and a hidden service are very different things.
Exit nodes are tor relays from where the traffic going to an internet website (on the "clearnet") emerges from the Tor network to the outside. They are more problematic to manage then non-exit relays because when somebody uses the Tor network for nefarious purposes such as spam the target website will see that this traffic is coming from the exit node.
An onion/hidden service is a website that is served only by the Tor network. See for example this proxy of the Internet Archive: http://archivecrfip2lpi.onion/ (you need to use the Tor Browser Bundle from https://torproject.org to be able to visit that address)
I put a simplified explanation on how Tor works and how a hidden service work on the proposal page[1], and a more detailed explanation of the difference between an exit node and an onion service[2].
Cristian
[1]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_Tor_Onion_Service_for_Wikip... [2]: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:IdeaLab/A_Tor_Onion_Service_for_Wikip...