[arktos_]

Pardon my ignorance, but I thought it fruitful to ask: Are there any issues that can arise by doing this on a VPS?

I ask because I know of stories of law enforcement sending inquiries to owners of, say, exit nodes requiring certain information about given traffic. I don't know if this happens for middle-nodes (or whatever they're called).

Moreover, are there any issues with associating a node to, you know, your name and billing information?

I don't know much about this, and although I could look it up, I think that my questions - and your respective answers or those of others - might do some public service of information sharing here.

[GTP]

I never operated a TOR node, but as far as I know and heard from other sources, TOR realays don't get much attention from law enforcement, it any attention at all. Which makes sense: all they're doing is getting encrypted traffic in and giving encrypted traffic out. It would hard for them to link a relay node to a specific connection, and even if they do, you can't help them in any way: even you as the node operator are only able to see encrypted traffic.

Edit: there's a youtuber called "Mental Outlaw" that published a while ago some videos about setting up and operating TOR nodes. He sometimes gives inaccurate information regarding more theoretical topics, so I don't follow him much. But I think he can be trusted for this practical topics.

[WHA8m]

Just a quick note on the Youtube channel you mention: I follow his videos for a while and it seems to me, that he's half a shill. My impression is, that he re-models popular HN threads into Youtube videos. Just watch the latest video on the MrBeast topic and you'll basically get the same info as all the popular 'root' comments (was on HN front page last week). Not the first time I noticed a suspicious connection.

[asmor]

Mental Outlaw definitely doesn't know how to threat model anything. Keeps assuming you'll be targeted specifically, but then tries to evade that with i2p and Tor. Most people aren't going to be specifically targeted though, especially if they keep a low profile (i.e. don't be one of ~50k i2p users, that's sure to be a selector) and especially not for torrenting content illegally (as opposed to illegal content).

If your threat model is actually three letter agencies coming after you specifically... that's an entirely different problem not (just) solved by software.

[INTPenis]

I ran tor exit nodes on Linode and Digitalocean for years. No real issues, but you will get regular abuse complaints.

The support teams always understood once I explained it was a tor exit node. I co-operated with the Cloud provider and added any IP-address that requested it to my list of exempt addresses.

[ranger_danger]

> The support teams always understood

But they don't have to. It could also be against their ToS, and many other providers would not have been ok with it. Accounts and domains have been taken away for much less.

[dunghill]

There was a recent HN topic where person running exit nodes run into quite a lot of issues because of it.

[immibis]

Non-exit nodes are generally considered safe to run. it's only exit nodes that system enforcement keeps trying to shut down.

[voldacar]

I'm not an exit node.

You can buy a vps with xmr if you're worried about privacy from law enforcement.

[Imustaskforhelp]

most vps don't support xmr though. any suggestions to whom I can trust (I basically only trust hetzner in vps space)