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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.

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.

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.

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.

I've went from being broke most of my young life, to homeless a short period, to being employed as a programmer to eventually being financially independent, I'm not sure there is much difference ultimately, besides being able to afford more expensive things. I used to buy stuff I enjoyed, if I could afford it, I still buy stuff I enjoy, but never buy things to just buy it, mostly happy with the stuff I have, except for some computers stuff that I don't neeeeeeed. But it's really nice to have 96GB of VRAM available for example.

Don't overthink either directions, be happy with what you have and focus on what you want to do, rather than "what you should have" or similar. Not sure anyone can really give you good non-generic tips here, without knowing more about your specific situation.

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.

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.

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This is a cool project.

> Thankfully the hosting provider I chose BuyVM happens to be borderline bulletproof, and has no qualms with hosting extremist content. I’ve been a happy customer for a while for hosting tiny networking projects and personal website at good prices, and I was pretty blissfully unaware of their darker side when I bought the service. Luckily their very pro-free speech pro-privacy policies comes in handy for this project

...

Yeah not awesome, heavy irony in this paragraph. Been looking at some other providers recently with comparable prices, my infrastructure isn’t to complicated to migrate just haven’t had the chance to make the jump.

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The main motivation of the author seems to be that Tor is slow, but you can significantly speed it up by manually choosing Tor nodes. For instance, if you pick your three fast nodes within a short distance of you location, then the speed is significantly higher then the default tor settings.