
User Tries to Suggest Tor Added Censor Functions for Relays - CM30
https://archive.fo/Tvzyo
======
CM30
In other words, they completely fail to understand why Tor works the way it
does. It's meant to be a neutral service that can be used to access content
some authorities might not like if necessary.

Any ability to censor nodes on a gateway level provides an opportunity for
unsavoury figures (like governments and businesses) to demand Tor censorship
in regards to everything from copyright to political speech they don't agree
with.

~~~
schoen
This proposal was made about hidden services rather than exit nodes. Exit
nodes can already refuse to exit to particular sites (by IP address).

[https://stem.torproject.org/api/exit_policy.html](https://stem.torproject.org/api/exit_policy.html)

However, when doing so, they have to declare this so that nobody will try to
exit to those sites through them. They aren't allowed to claim to be able to
exit to a site but then refuse to actually do it (if a scanner catches an exit
relay doing so, it will be marked as a BadExit).

Again, for exit relays, they can openly say "Don't use this relay if you want
to access site X", but not "It's fine to use this relay to access site X [but
we will secretly then block it]". However, if multiple sites share a single IP
address, or if sites use domain fronting to bypass blocking, exit nodes won't
succeed in selectively refusing to help people connect to individual sites via
exit policy.

Hidden services don't have this feature but it would probably be technically
possible to add a feature for current-generation hidden services where relays
attempt to disrupt connections to particular hidden services (although not all
relays will be in a position to do so). In my understand of next-generation
hidden services, which are being rolled out now, it's no longer technically
possible for relays to do this because the identity of the hidden service
being connected to is hidden from everyone. But I'd like to double-check this
to better understand exactly what is hidden from whom.

The kind of proposal this person made is definitely a non-starter for Tor at
the community level; the Tor community overall is committed to the idea that
nobody should have the power to monitor or block communications (at least at
the network layer). There may be disagreement about how that power should be
used when it happens to exist, but I think the community's ideal of trying to
get rid of that power is clear.

