Hacker News Reader

Comment by fragfester | Hacker News Reader

It's my fault. I'll try to find a way to get this data and eventually adjust my code to not include non-exit relays or at least recategorize them as a lower severity.

View on HN

Not your fault - not talking about your service specifically! My IP was banned by several other companies (I assume from a list that was purchased from a third party) like Hulu/Netflix because I was simply relaying non-exit traffic.

TOR and people who speak for the service often say that it's safe to run a non-exit relay. It isn't. It's tracked and punished. I know from first-hand experience.

Does Tor use it's own port? If so, how hard would it be to switch it to use something like 80, 23, or even 8080?

The IP of a Tor relay is publicly distributed, that's how other nodes know to connect to it.

You can see for yourself: https://atlas.torproject.org

Although at a guess, most of these services probably do the simplest thing possible and go by an open port.

I've been running Tor relays from home for about a year. Only sites I've found to block me are Monoprice and Apple's support forums. Hulu and Netflix are fine.

Why would they increase the threat profile of an IP in any way at all? An exit node, sure, but a relay? What possible threat could a relay pose?

Agreed it was a mistake on my part, I'll fix it up shortly to include only exit nodes.

Thanks, I really appreciate it.

Due to a similar IP reputation service, I couldn't pay my taxes from home this year, just because I had run a non-exit Tor relay recently. It's a big problem.

ETA: I'd also strongly recommend not marking an IP address specially in any way just for having a non-exit relay -- from what I've seen, the clients of IP reputation vendors also don't understand the distinction, so they block both kinds if told about both kinds. It's an attractive nuisance.

> Due to a similar IP reputation service, I couldn't pay my taxes from home this year, just because I had run a non-exit Tor relay recently. It's a big problem.

Something doesn't seem correct to me about this...

Doesn't really matter - it happens. I'm not specifically talking about the OP's service but rather another third party list that was purchased by other companies. My IP was banned. Whether it should have been or not is up for debate, but I can tell you I was confused for a week straight when I was getting cryptic Hulu/Netflix/Bank/etc error messages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com