Matt Thorne wrote:

it would work better if they were required to contribute.

It would work better from a technical perspective only. From an overall view "requiring" anyone who runs a tor client to run a tor server would not be good for the project. There would be backlash. We've seen that some websites (Slashdot, Wikipedia, Gentoo Forums) can take action against tor server operators that can be frustrating to resolve. If people who just want to run the client through a cool Firefox extension don't understand that they may also get banned from certain websites because they are "required" to also run a tor server, then we will hear from those frustrated users and the project/extension will get a bad rap. Instead, we should just make it really easy for people to opt-in to contributing some bandwidth as a server. Enough people would opt-in if it were really simple that we would probably still see some performance gains. I also have an idea for scaling the # of tor servers dramatically that I'll post about soon. I like this firefox extension idea a lot though too. Brian

On 11/19/05, Arrakis Tor <arrakistor@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hello fellow tor-nerds,

This was mentioned to me last week. It was suggested to me to implement Torpark as a Firefox plugin.

Well, I don't think that would work since Torpark is designed to be stand-alone and mobile.

But tell you what, if we fitted Tor to be a firefox XPI/extension it sure would be the most popular Firefox plugin ever.

What if we created a Firefox plugin for just Tor, and it allowed Firefox users to configure their level of involvement (using firefox extension as the GUI). They could set if they were just rendezvous/man middle, or even if they wanted to let their machine be an exit node, and of course plug their browser into Tor directly (thanks to firefox 1.5 and later). All from a simple firefox extention.

This would be an excellent solution to bandwidth issues, an bring a new level of global involvement for Tor server presence.

What do you think?

ST

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