Mandriva to ship Skype [LWN.net]

Mandriva to ship Skype

Posted Dec 22, 2005 6:52 UTC (Thu) by Duncan (guest, #6647)
In reply to: Mandriva to ship Skype by evgeny
Parent article: Mandriva to ship Skype

> BTW, if you choose to participate in the
> Tor network (http://tor.eff.org/) - truly
> free/open protocol and implementation -
> someone else might be using your bandwidth
> as well.

Incorrect, if you just run a Tor client. Tor clients get access to the
Tor network, but don't carry any additional traffic for it. Of course, in
so doing, they lack that additional traffic to help camouflage any
activity of their own, so it's not as "safe", but that's their choice.

If you run a Tor server, then certainly, but that's sort of the
purpose/point. The Tor servers, BTW, implement exit policies, such that
the admin can choose what they wish to allow to exit from their server
directly onto the web. In fact, many don't allow anything to exit
directly onto the web, in which case the server becomes simply a Tor-relay
server, relaying only internally to other Tor servers, which do have an
exit policy allowing that type of TCP (by port, I believe) onto the net.

(I happen to have recently spent several hours researching Tor. They have
quite a lot of useful documentation, both on Tor, and on Internet
anonymity in general. Thus, the detailed knowledge. Now if you had used
freenet or gnunet or something similar as your example, I believe you'd
have been correct. It's just not correct for Tor.)

Duncan

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Mandriva to ship Skype

Posted Dec 22, 2005 8:46 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link]

> Incorrect, if you just run a Tor client.

You're right, I should have been more clear. However, I used the term "participate". Being a client doesn't really mean participate...

Anyway, let's be honest: either majority of Tor users run in the server mode or those who do (minority otherwise) need to carry on a lot of "foreign" traffic. The later case (which is the current situation with Tor, as far as I understand) might be ok for an experimental low-profile activities (again, that's what Tor today is), but once you're talking about millions of users, this becomes impractical and/or extremely expensive. The fact is even Microsoft can't afford it for their netmeeting stuff - anything except chat won't work unless you can establish a direct p2p connectivity.

> Now if you had used freenet or gnunet or something similar as your example, I believe you'd have been correct.

Agreed, freenet would be a more straightforward example.