FWIW I haven't ever experienced any issues using Tor on multiple Comcast
residential and business lines.
I use Tor as a client daily from a Comcast residential connection and
have never been unable to connect to directories or relays.
I also have a directory client running 24/7 on Comcast business and it
hasn't had any Tor-related connectivity issues over the last 6+ years.
I just spun up a new /relay/ on a Comcast residential connection and
have no issues talking to other relays and I've confirmed the ORPort is
reachable from multiple other AS's in the US and abroad.
│ 09:11:35 [NOTICE] Self-testing indicates your ORPort
98.45.218.223:9001 is reachable from the outside. Excellent. Publishing
server descriptor.
│
https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/42BD1CC75EA01755D1F7DC8205C9ED9B19C7DC96
If anyone wants to test reachability to this Comcast relay, I'll leave
it up for the next 48 hours or so.
I'm not necessarily a fan of Comcast or any of their practices and am
only speaking for myself here but I haven't ever experienced any
blocking or difficulty.
Are you sure that port forwarding To your relay is reliably working and
that some "security feature" in your Comcast modem/router isn't causing
the problem? I haven't researched any reports of Comcast blocking so I
can't speak to any other anecdotal reports of said blocking. I sure hope
it isn't the case. If it is, I'll certainly drop them in a flash too.
Regards,
Drew
On 6/11/23 04:46, xmrk2 via tor-relays wrote:
I'd like to raise awareness of the Comcast blocking.
As stated in subject, I believe Comcast blocks all traffic between its
customers and public tor relay nodes. That is, the blocking is not
limited to tor-related traffic, all other services / ports on the tor
relay are blocked.
Background: I am running a lightning node, lightning is a layer 2
protocol to scale Bitcoin. Lightning nodes need to be connected to
each other ideally 24/7. I was contacted by the operator of another
Lightning node, complaining that he cannot connect to my node. He is
Comcast customer, I am not. I was also running a tor relay on the same
public IPv4 address.
I am pretty sure that the blocking is done by Comcast and is triggered
by being in public list of tor relays. The blocking disappeared after
I stopped my tor relay and restarted my router (thus getting a new
external IPv4 address). After 1 day, I relaunched the tor relay, and
the blocking reappeared a few hours later. It was also confirmed by
the said operator of the lightning node, who said there were various
rounds of blocking tor, customers complaining and Comcast lifting the
block for some time, only to reinstate the blocking later.
Comcast thus discourages me and similar people from running tor
relays, or at least forces me to run tor in bridge mode. So this is an
insidious attack on tor. Note that Bitcoin is not particularly
relevant, Comcast is blocking tor nodes, not bitcoin nodes. So even if
you hate Bitcoin, note that the same problem could arise even if
Bitcoin never existed: e.g. a self-hosted web server, whose owner
wants to donate his free capacity to tor by running tor relay. By
doing this, he prevents any Comcast customers from accessing his web
server, and this consequence is not obvious at all.
Any ideas on how to combat this? I was thinking about including some
false positives in tor relay list. Imagine including some Google
servers' IP addresses - Comcast customers suddenly cannot connect to
Google, unless Comcast stops this blocking... or simply whitelists
Google. But those false positives sound ugly and a bit malicious, not
sure it is a good idea.
I already wrote about this publicly, and also wrote a mail to EFF.
Hope I am not spamming, I feel this is quite important issue and am a
bit frustrated by the lack of attention it gets.
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