On Tue, Jun 30, 2020 at 10:13:37PM -0000, sean_sulli...@danwin1210.me wrote: > I have questions about the Tor node freja. > > First, according to https://torstatus.rueckgr.at/, the node is at > 194.88.143.66 which is in Italy. Yet WHOIS says the addresses > 194.88.142.0-194.88.143.255 are in Pune, India. The last IP from a > traceroute is 81.25.202.165 and 81.25.202.128-81.25.202.255 is in IT > (Italy) which suggests that https://torstatus.rueckgr.at/ is correct. > > Why would WHOIS inaccurately (I think) say the IP is in India?
whois, and geoip databases, are notoriously inaccurate. This is a fine illustration that it's not good to rely on them for situations that really matter. In particular, there's a pattern where some European country "loans" an address block to somewhere in Africa or Asia, and then takes it back a few years later, but nobody bothers updating whois for a while. This pattern is also illustrated by some of the periodic spikes we have of hundreds of thousands of new Tor users in Uganda -- they're actually Tor users in Germany, but the geoip is wrong. (To make things more exciting, sometimes there *are* spikes of many Tor users in Uganda. But it means every time you see a pattern on one of the metrics graphs, you have to wonder what you're actually seeing.) > Second, according to https://torstatus.rueckgr.at/, freja is not an exit > node. But if you use... > > StrictNodes 1 > ExitNodes freja > > ...then TBB will load the purple introductory screen Explore. Privately. > (I tried with other non-exit nodes and TBB typically gets stuck on > Requesting Relay Information and never loads the purple screen). > > However, then freja will not load any pages. > > So if its not an exit node, why does the introductory screen load? Tor Browser's "about:tor" screen is served locally -- it does not come from any remote website. This is one of the Tor Browser usability improvements from some years ago, where "making users wait for their Tor to bootstrap, and then fetch a remote page, before the browser window appears" is no fun so we fixed it. --Roger -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
