Run a TOR node, help Iranians and others keep their privacy

Want to do something more meaningful for Iran's dissidents than turning your Twitter avatar green? EFF would like you to run a TOR bridge or relay, which will allow Iranians, and others around the world, to communicate with enhanced privacy and secrecy.

More sophisticated users can skip this paragraph, but for the rest, here's the basic outline. Tor (an acronym of "The Onion Router") is free and open source software that helps users remain anonymous on the Internet. Normally, when accessing websites, your computer asks for and receives a webpage out in the open, a process that exposes your IP address, the URL of the website, and the contents of the site, among other information to third parties. When accessing websites while using Tor, your computer essentially whispers its requests for a website, to another computer, which passes the request on to another computer, which passes it on to another computer, which passes it onto the computer where the website is hosted; the reply returns in the same, chain-message manner. The whispers are encrypted, so that neither outside authorities, nor the computers in the middle of the chain, can tell what is being said, and to whom. And the website itself does not have your IP address either.

Internet users in Iran are using Tor to both (a) circumvent censorship systems and (b) remain anonymous while reading and writing on the Internet. Both are critically important to the safety of protesters, many of whom fear retaliation from the government. Preliminary reports indicate that use of the Tor client in Iran has increased in the days after the contested election.

Whatever you think of Mousavi, I suspect that we all agree that Iranian citizens should be allowed to communicate without being spied upon by their governments (if only Americans enjoyed this right!).

Help Protesters in Iran: Run a Tor Bridge or a Tor Relay

[Anonymous June 29, 2009 10:47 PM]

You can also send money to Iran's Red Crescent Society through your local chapter of the American Red Cross.

And Avaaz.org is doing something about bandwidth.

Slightly more information about both can be found at generalkaty.blogspot.com, if anyone is interested.

[manicbassman June 29, 2009 11:02 PM]

I'd love to run one, however, my ISP's terms of service do not permit me to run a server... and I don't want it being used for kiddie/extreme porn either. So just how can one run a TOR node without it being used for porn?

PS. I'd read the tor faqs, but worryingly, www.torproject.org is down and not just for me...

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://www.torproject.org/

[ioerror June 29, 2009 11:50 PM]

manicbassman, The best bet is to run as a bridge or as a middle relay. This will allow you to only have encrypted traffic passing through your computer. A bridge will be useful to people who are otherwise unable to access the Tor network. A relay is useful for everyone (including bridge users).

[zuzu June 30, 2009 12:35 AM]

I prefer I2P, which has far more bandwidth available within its network (enough for BitTorrent even, which cripples the TOR network), but there's no reason you can't run both (unless you're quite lacking in bandwidth yourself).

p.s. Don't forget YaCy, the distributed open-source search engine.

[Magian June 30, 2009 5:12 AM]

Typical Cory Doctorow. He lives in the most surveilled country on Earth (England) and lobs offhanded comments about Americans being spied upon. We all know what went/goes on with the NSA Cory, and as such, we don't need to be snarkily reminded about it every third post or so from you.

BTW, hope you place the sequel to "Little Brother" in your adopted country this time around Cory.

[grimc June 30, 2009 9:05 AM]

I am in favor of BB starting every morning with a reminder that FISA is still in effect.

[Magian June 30, 2009 9:32 AM]

@GRIMC, well, if you need a reminder, read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act

I am painfully aware of what is happening, but don't come to BB to constantly have my face rubbed in angst-induced posting.

[Takuan June 30, 2009 9:35 AM]

so just read the happy bits

[grikdog June 30, 2009 10:23 AM]

Running TOR on Ubuntu is problematic for casual users. First, configuring Software Sources to "get Tor." Second, editing /etc/tor/torrc to provide non-default behavior (why? because of ominous warnings about Tor-Abuse). Even if one is able to do the research required before munging a runtime configuration file, balancing the effort required against feel-good help the Iranians (and the terrorists, and the zornographers, and the...) is a bit much. In short, going from HEARING ABOUT "The Onion Router" to IMPLEMENTING "The Onion Router" to HELPING the Iranians to ANSWERING QUESTIONS from myISP, myFBI, myNSA, myMOSSAD, etc. is asking a lot. The product is frankly not ready for myTime, let alone PRIMEtime.

[pentomino June 30, 2009 10:27 AM]

Well, I agree with @5 -- Cory could just as easily have said "Britons" instead of "Americans", right? And though we're all in this together, @6's "FISA is still in effect" reminder would be no better than Fox News's "Terror Alert Level ORANGE" reminder.

And speaking of us all being in this together, it's nice to help the protesters with Tor, but I'm more interested in helping everyone else who needs it but shouldn't. In Iran, whether there's an election or not, it's dangerous to be an atheist, a musician, a journalist, or a homosexual. And there will always be a country where such things are true. So don't take your relay down when the turmoil in Iran ends. Dial back the bandwidth maybe, but leave it up, for the rest of the world.

I don't run as an exit node, because that's where you start getting the wrong kind of attention here in the West. But I wonder if there's a way to tweak an exit policy to allow exits only to a handful of websites, like Twitter and Facebook, where it's likely to help a lot of people, but unlikely to be used for things I don't want attached to my particular IP address.

[Antinous / Moderator June 30, 2009 10:29 AM]

I am painfully aware of what is happening, but don't come to BB to constantly have my face rubbed in angst-induced posting.

Is there actually a hand pressing your face into the monitor? Is it part of a kinky scene?

Duress fail.

[echolocate chocolate June 30, 2009 10:33 AM]

#5 Magian, have you not been reading BB very long? Cory writes at least as many furious posts about the idiotic security policies in the UK and Canada as he does about the US. The UK being relatively more heavily surveilled does not make anywhere else less, in absolute terms.

[grimc June 30, 2009 10:35 AM]

I'm sick of reading whiny comments about Cory talking too much about his book, so whiny comments about Cory complaining about America while not being a resident of America are actually kind of refreshing.

[SKR June 30, 2009 10:57 AM]

@pentomino

I don't run as an exit node, because that's where you start getting the wrong kind of attention here in the West. But I wonder if there's a way to tweak an exit policy to allow exits only to a handful of websites, like Twitter and Facebook, where it's likely to help a lot of people, but unlikely to be used for things I don't want attached to my particular IP address.

The answer to your question is, "yes, you can setup exit conditions to limit to twitter or facebook with TOR"

[Giovanni June 30, 2009 11:26 AM]

Cory, what about bayesian analysis?

The iranian revolutionary guard doesn't need to know the contents of your traffic to arrest you and throw in you in a deep whole, they just need to know that you're trying to hide something and then use power drills to find out what.

I'd love to help but in some ways doesn't using encrypted connections create unusual traffic patterns and call attention to the users? They are, after all, doing deep packet inspection.

[Takuan June 30, 2009 11:41 AM]

have you read the accounts of arrest and torture? They don't need any evidence or answers, they just torture whoever they grab and all the rest are cowed. They could care less if you are actually hiding anything.

[Ernunnos June 30, 2009 12:54 PM]

Bear in mind that what you're actually enabling when you run TOR is Nigerian 419 scams and kiddie porn. There might be a handful of Iranian tweets in there, but they're a few bytes, in comparison to the gigabytes spam and illicit images and video consume.

TOR is another great idea that fails to take human nature into account. And a great idea that only works in another reality where humans have a different nature is actually a horrible idea.

It's this human's nature to laugh cruelly at starry-eyed simpletons who fire up TOR thinking they're doing the world a favor, only to find nice men in suits knocking on their door.

[hemidemisemiquaver June 30, 2009 1:05 PM]

Sorry, but running a TOR node also pretty much guarantees that you will be contributing to dissemination of child pornography.

[Takuan June 30, 2009 1:11 PM]

http://psiphon.ca/

[AirPillo June 30, 2009 8:25 PM]

I ran a TOR node for a while, until I realized that some of my favorite forums and a vast number of IRC servers maintain a blacklist of all TOR exit node IPs.

That was a bit too much to put up with.

[Magian July 1, 2009 2:38 AM]

#11

Is there actually a hand pressing your face into the monitor? Is it part of a kinky scene?

Duress fail.

Too bad valid criticism seems to rub raw your fragile sensibilities. See a doctor about that soon.

Moderator fail

[shadowfirebird July 1, 2009 8:36 AM]

@Magian:

erm, a "moderator fail" would have been disemvowelling you if your only crime was saying something that ill-considered.

Too bad that valid criticism seems to rub raw your fragile sensibilities. Now, who was it that said that? Let me think...

[Magian July 1, 2009 11:29 AM]

@Shadowfirebird

Perhaps moderators should simply moderate and not be sycophants to the poster in question.

Who said that? Why me, who else?

[Mcdaddy October 20, 2009 9:53 AM]

Well, that's good rule to implement. It can be more fair for everyone. And effect of this is a more secured community.
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