"semantics of the statement" ? Are you just throwing words together now?


Nope. "I've been a linode customer for 'n' years" is a statement of fact; "1+1=2" is a statement of fact; "EFF has been wrong on a number of legal arguments" is a statement of fact; "Neo believes Tor is legal" appears to be a fact based on your writings but that's just my opinion; "I believe Neo believed Tor is legal" is a matter of fact"; "Tor is legal" is an opinion.

Spot the difference.

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Rgds
Stephen
(Linux user since kernel version 0.11)

Wrong! If there was any case law to back this up, they wouldn't be saying "We believe Tor is legal" at all. They'd be saying "under current case law, Tor has been held to be legal". There is a big difference between those two statements.

The crux of EFF's belief is that a court is going to find that someone who runs a TOR relay is a service provider and therefore gets the same common carrier-level protections that the Verizon's and AT&T's and Level3's and HE's of the world get. This is a long-shot, like much of the crap EFF espouses.

Like sweh, I'm with EFF on many of their ideals, but not the way they go about it or their abysmal success rate.

I will replace it with a simpler word: "meaning of the statement". Better now?


There is no semantic (pardon the difficult word) difference. These are all expressions of opinion. There are more reasons to consider valid some of them than the others, but this doesn't make them any less an expression of opinion.

The two statements you are comparing are very different indeed, but these aren't the statements I was comparing, so I don't see how this contradicts anything I said.

Worth noting is that there is a very very big difference between "running Tor" and "running Tor as an exit node and becoming the source IP address for arbitrary packets." Tor itself is neutral, like eating a sandwich.

There's also a big difference between "illegal" and "in violation of Terms of Service." Internet abuse mitigation is generally a finger-pointing hierarchy, where Linode's providers point to Linode, Linode points to you, and you hopefully make it stop. Repeated finger-pointing on the same issue without positive results gets noticed by the levels above, and the trick to Internet survival is to not be noticed by the Network Abuse Department.

Furthermore, there are very specific procedures for handling various things. Copyright infringement has the DMCA, which is what it is. Criminally illegal stuff goes through its process, with investigations and charges and courtrooms and all that (and THIS is where you're going to want a really good lawyer). Network abuse, like unsolicited bulk e-mail, denial of service attacks, perpetuating annoying forum threads, etc., is entirely different.

In short, it can be as "legal" as apple pie and still be a perfectly valid reason for a provider to show you the door.

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/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

Bad analogies are like leaky screwdrivers.

Whole story on the EFF site.

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/ Peter

So, do you think tor_zealot will come back to this thread and apologize to all the other linode customers he placed in reckless jeopardy?

Scott Phillips

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/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */

I'm sorry, I come from slashdot; can you give me a car analogy?

But. They. Took. Away. The. Disks. For. A. Time.

Now imagine this happening in a datacenter... what will they take? A single RAID shelf (40 VPSes)? Whole rack of machines (hundreds of VPSes)? All the disks in the Linode-rented section (tens of thousands of VPSes)?

If you want to risk pissing off the law (even if "undeservedly" as you claim), by running a TOR exit, sure, do it, and suffer the results.
But you have no right to endanger innocent neighbors on the host / in the datacenter.

IMO, a way to run a "safe" TOR node would involve a full packet / protocol inspection, limiting it to HTTP (or HTTPS with a MITM re-cryption so you can inspect), AND detection of spam/exploit/etc HTTP requests (limit in number, detect common attack patterns and known exploit calls).

If you're so very dedicated to help the poor oppressed people in totalitarian countries, who oh-so-need the TOR for "freedom", you'll sure find time to take the effort of doing this.

Otherwise, don't be a kid playing with grenades.

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rsk, providing useless advice on the Internet since 2005.

You are risking pissing off the law by running a web server. There have been cases when law enforcement (wrongfully) raided homes of people who weren't running much more than a web server. By your logic, this is reason enough for Linode to prohibit running web servers.

I agree the risk is higher if you run TOR exit node. But other US hosting providers have been allowing TOR exit nodes for years without a single incident, probably because they have procedures in place to handle any violation notices properly.

Procedures which might require them to increase their prices to handle the claims. If it's a choice between higher prices and TOR exits allowed vs. no price increase and TOR exits banned...I know what I'm picking.

So why not GO THERE instead of torturing us here?