[tor-relays] EFF's university Tor relay campaign

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Hi folks!

EFF has launched their advocacy campaign for getting more Tor relays
running at universities:

We're focusing on universities in particular, not just to get more
capacity for the Tor network, but also to strengthen the connections
between the Tor network and academia. Universities are great locations for
Tor relays for education (Tor is part of every cybersecurity curriculum
these days), for community (growing connections between students and
research groups), and for research (helping the Tor network stay strong
so people can use it for research):

Having more relays at universities is especially useful because it can
help others to see that running a relay is a normal and straightforward
thing to do.

So: if you are at a university, or you know somebody who is and want to
help them, please consider setting up relays there. It can be anything
from an exit relay (the most useful to Tor users, but the most work in
terms of local advocacy and relationship-building), to a non-exit relay
(still very useful to Tor users, because we need more network diversity),
to a non-NATed Snowflake bridge (currently used most by people in Iran
to get around their censorship and reach the Tor network).

We started the campaign with thirteen institutions that are already
running relays and/or other public infrastructure pieces:

    Technical University Berlin (Germany)
    Boston University (US)
    University of Cambridge (England)
    Carnegie Melon University (US)
    University College London (England)
    Georgetown University (US)
    Johannes Kepler Universität Linz (Austria)
    Karlstad University (Sweden)
    KU Leuven (Belgium)
    University of Michigan (US)
    University of Minnesota (US)
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
    University of Waterloo (Canada)

Hopefully this list will make you impressed / excited / jealous and you
will want to get your university onto it. :slight_smile:

Later steps in the campaign will be to understand which universities
have IT departments that understand and value Tor, and which ones try
to block you from using Tor on their network or block Tor users from
reaching their webservers. We are also imagining to do an OONI workshop
to help people do "how well does Tor work on this network" tests.

Here is the internal coordination/roadmap ticket if you want to follow
along in detail:

Thanks!
--Roger

···

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6 Likes
2

Roger Dingledine dijo [Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 03:19:06AM -0400]:

(...)
We started the campaign with thirteen institutions that are already
running relays and/or other public infrastructure pieces:

    Technical University Berlin (Germany)
    Boston University (US)
    University of Cambridge (England)
    Carnegie Melon University (US)
    University College London (England)
    Georgetown University (US)
    Johannes Kepler Universität Linz (Austria)
    Karlstad University (Sweden)
    KU Leuven (Belgium)
    University of Michigan (US)
    University of Minnesota (US)
    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)
    University of Waterloo (Canada)

Hopefully this list will make you impressed / excited / jealous and you
will want to get your university onto it. :slight_smile:

Yes, I do!

Please add to the list:

    Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

We have been running two relays since 2017/2018, and enabled two additional
relays (in the same VM / IP address) recently.

Later steps in the campaign will be to understand which universities
have IT departments that understand and value Tor, and which ones try
to block you from using Tor on their network or block Tor users from
reaching their webservers. We are also imagining to do an OONI workshop
to help people do "how well does Tor work on this network" tests.

Our university is very, very big (>350,000 students), and runs somewhat as a
federations of faculties and research centers, so yo will find friendly and
hostile network administrators (as well as friendly and hostile administrators)
throughout.

Greetings,

5 Likes
3

Awesome! I will pass your contact info to Cooper, who will add you to
the internal lists he is tracking.

I missed some relays-running-at-educational-institutions on the first
pass, because we don't have an easy way to look up "which relays are at
universities?" If anybody wants to help work on that, it's

We also have a handful of known great relay operators, such as the ones
run by ibiblio at UNC and a few in Germany, who didn't answer my mails
yet and I expect that eventually we will add them.

Cooper showed me the beautiful shiny challenge coins that he made to
send to university relay operators. They are a work of art. I believe his
plan is to send them to people once their relay has been up for a year,
i.e. some people qualify already but the people who newly start a relay
in response to this EFF campaign will have to keep it going for a while
to earn the shiny object. :slight_smile:

--Roger

···

On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 11:18:46AM -0600, Gunnar Wolf wrote:

Yes, I do!

Please add to the list:

    Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

We have been running two relays since 2017/2018, and enabled two additional
relays (in the same VM / IP address) recently.

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4

EFF has launched their advocacy campaign for getting more Tor relays
running at universities:

https://toruniversity.eff.org/

Cooper has posted an update on how the campaign is going:

Highlights include:

* we have made contact with more already-existing relays at universities,

* we now have some new relays running at universities,

* and we have made better contact with European NRENs (the national-level
university internet connectivity organizations), particularly the ones in
Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Greece.

So: if you are at a university, or you know somebody who is and want to
help them, please consider setting up relays there. It can be anything
from an exit relay (the most useful to Tor users, but the most work in
terms of local advocacy and relationship-building), to a non-exit relay
(still very useful to Tor users, because we need more network diversity),
to a non-NATed Snowflake bridge (currently used most by people in Iran
to get around their censorship and reach the Tor network).

This part is still true! No time like the present to get involved. :slight_smile:

--Roger

···

On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 03:19:06AM -0400, Roger Dingledine wrote:

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