[fishgoesblub]

So the author doesn't want to cough up the money to buy a VPN but will instead write a custom Tor client that is intentionally weak on anonymity so they can run their own exit node on a VPS they bought. Why not setup Wireguard and use the VPS as a VPN? More power to them, seems like they learned some things and are happy with the results, I just don't get it though.

[guessmyname]

I call it “The Broke College Student Syndrome.”

Most of us did stuff like this when we were younger.

For starters, we were broke. I mean, we didn’t have enough extra cash to pay for something we knew we could probably get for free. Back then, having a credit card in college was basically a “rich kid” thing. The money we had was whatever was in our pockets, maybe stashed under a pillow, or saved in a piggy bank. These days, kids are more “modern,” so the idea of not having a card paid for by mom or dad, or at least some extra cash, sounds ridiculous. But that’s how it was for a lot of us.

So I’d constantly look for ways around paying, because I genuinely couldn’t afford it. Think learning C just to write a keygen.exe and bypass license checks, doing in-memory hex edits to tweak games and give myself more virtual coins, or forking Tor to get single-hop proxy connections.

Good ol’times.

[LoganDark]

I remember when I was younger and didn't have a single cent to spend, at all. Any payment requirement would completely lock me out, because I had no payment method.

[fragmede]

The question is, how do you live now? I remember being on University email lists that I had no business being on, just to get find out when they had free food that I could eat. I grew up ridiculously cheap and broke college student syndrome only exacerbated things. I've gone too far in the other direction, which is equally as unhealthy, but I can't be the only one.

[bauruine]

He uses the keys of his non-exit relay to directly connect from his workstation to an exit relay pretending to be the relay on his VPS. But yeah he could just use the VPS for wireguard which would be way easier.

I'm in Europe so I don't get less than 20Mbit/s on any circuit but I asume he could have got the same speed by just selecting a few local, fast nodes as bridge.

[rendx]

If you have time on your hands which is basically free for you, and you run the relay at home too, there's no extra cost involved. You don't need a VPS to run a (non-exit) relay. Even if you do, the VPS will be associated with you much more directly than a third party exit, which is unlikely set up to log IPs. The VPS IP might even be publicly associated with you, if you use it e.g. also for web hosting. And Tor allows you to pick the exit location, like VPN services often offer different locations.

And could it possibly be that people exist that do things for pure enjoyment of the exercise? Looks like they learned quite a bit throughout the process. In practical terms, this may even land them a job at Tor (or elsewhere) later, since they can demonstrate that they understood what it is doing and where to find the relevant pieces of information to "circumvent" the protection.