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Tor’s shadowy reputation will only end if we all use it | Engadget
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This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I said suspicion, not evidence. The suspicion arises when you try to answer the following 2 basic questions:
Or put another way, apart from a few idealists like the Calyx Institute, nobody in their right mind would foot the bill to run servers mostly used by hackers and pedos. Therefore, the most likely operators are law enforcement and nefarious barely-constitutional three-letter agencies.
TLAs, LEOs and criminals are both Tor end users and have an interest in attacking Tor users.
Everybody has the resources to run Tor relays and even exits, though the latter can become a massive legal nuisance. Servers are cheap. Read the Tor mailing list archives.
As to 'mostly used by hackers and pedos', please provide the evidence. Factual one, not non-sequiturs based on faulty assumptions.
Regarding your second point, I worked in IT at a large university about 15 years ago and set up an exit node briefly on a spare system I had. The IT security team tracked it down fairly quickly because of the sudden flurry of malicious traffic associated with it. So I had to shut it down fairly soon after I fired it up.
Most networks are likely going to have a similar reaction if running an exit node results in malicious activity on those networks. Ask yourself - who would willingly allow that to happen? It wouldn’t surprise me if the answer is organizations that want to monitor that traffic for one reason or another.