(Comment made from a throwaway account, because I can't be bothered with the potential for future hassle from possible employers over it)
> In addition to the reasons you mentioned, some people have had surprise 6am home visits from law enforcement for running exit nodes.
As someone who has had one of those surprise 6am home visits, I can attest to it being something you Do Not Want, especially from inexperienced British police officers who don't really understand what Tor is. To their credit they were incredibly professional about the whole thing, but it still resulted in every device in my home capable of storing data being seized, and six month's of social services asserting that I couldn't be alone with my then one year old son while those devices were inspected by police investigators. (And social services really weren't at all professional about the process - their representative as good as told my wife to leave me because I was almost certainly guilty).
You then get the additional problem that "I'm being investigated by police because they think I'm a paedophile" isn't something you can easily talk to people about without conclusions being jumped to, and potentially making things even worse.
In summary, don't run a Tor exit node from your home internet connection in the UK unless you really want to see what the inside of a police cell is like, or fancy several months of intense stress in your life. You may think this is just scaremongering, and it won't happen to you, but that was precisely the attitude that resulted in me writing this.
Man that sucks, especially the social services part. Did everything work out in the end?
> […] in the UK
Or anywhere else for that matter, unless you are absolutely sure about the legality of the matter and how law enforcement will respond. I am under the impression that only corporations and institutions should run Tor exit nodes.
Yeah, it all worked out fine eventually, apart from me still being a little bit jumpy if someone knocks the door in the morning when I'm not expecting it.
The UK is probably one of the worst places in the English-speaking world to be accused of hosting something illegal. I've considered hosting a kink social network here (competition with Fetlife), but any sort of image sharing system would leave me incredibly open to the police. I've known people who hosted specific kink-related forums and similar, even without an image upload system, and had huge problems.
As far as I can tell the most reasonable thing to do if I wanted to go through with this would be to develop the software, and sell it on an ongoing basis to a company somewhere with reasonable laws which can actually operate it.
> In addition to the reasons you mentioned, some people have had surprise 6am home visits from law enforcement for running exit nodes.
As someone who has had one of those surprise 6am home visits, I can attest to it being something you Do Not Want, especially from inexperienced British police officers who don't really understand what Tor is. To their credit they were incredibly professional about the whole thing, but it still resulted in every device in my home capable of storing data being seized, and six month's of social services asserting that I couldn't be alone with my then one year old son while those devices were inspected by police investigators. (And social services really weren't at all professional about the process - their representative as good as told my wife to leave me because I was almost certainly guilty).
You then get the additional problem that "I'm being investigated by police because they think I'm a paedophile" isn't something you can easily talk to people about without conclusions being jumped to, and potentially making things even worse.
In summary, don't run a Tor exit node from your home internet connection in the UK unless you really want to see what the inside of a police cell is like, or fancy several months of intense stress in your life. You may think this is just scaremongering, and it won't happen to you, but that was precisely the attitude that resulted in me writing this.