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Comment by pg5 | Hacker News Reader

There should be a warning at the top of the readme to tell people that running this on any public cloud server will probably get your account terminated.

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Why would it?

To me it seems to consist only of legal projects like web archiving, folding, and a search proxy?

VPS providers usually have a clause against proxies and tor relays. Might be able to get away with it since it's a tor middle node not an exit node, but I wouldn't want to mess around if I'm using my server for anything important.

A Tor exit node will get you banned absolutely everywhere, and your VPS account terminated if it isn't. It's pretty irresponsible to suggest people run one if they aren't aware of the extremely high risk involved. Despite the screenshots (why is there no screenshot of what this actually runs) this only seems to run a Tor Relay, but similar caveats apply.

What kinds of screenshots should a project like this publish?

One that doesn't show it running something it doesn't do (an exit node).

Isn't the thing that's shown a search result of the relay search and not the actual running service?

That shows an exit node, yes.

Yes but it says "relay search", the screenshot shows you that it has a search feature for the relay directory.

Just like if a media player project shows a screenshot of a movie doesn't mean you'll get the movie by downloading the media player.

A warning is probably a good idea but "absolutely everywhere" is just wrong for an exit relay and even more so for a relay.

It also explicitly says the following in the description:

"Notes: Does not run a guard/exit node, only a middle relay node"

Running a middle relay is not "extremely high risk", I've them for years on both VPS providers and home ISPs without issues. Exit/guard nodes are a totally different ballgame, and are not recommended by this project.

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