Tor exit nodes in denmark
It is worth fighting for your digital rights and one of them is privacy. There is so many countries in the world that does not have the right to free speech. Russia has recently asked its citizens to install a goverment-approved browser or change settings. Kazakhstan has tried forcing a country wide surveillance. And in Denmark we still have illegal logning of our data, and when tried to fight that in court, even our highest courts defends the logging. Latest is that EU court has determined that our highest courts were wrong. Read more here https://ulovliglogning.dk/en/
All that means that there is still a lot to fight for, but it based on rankings, we are supposedly the most fair country in the world, ranking consistently in top3 on most lists. Eg. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/most-transparent-countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index https://www.google.com/search?q=the+most+fair+country+in+the+world
That means we have to set a good example and fight for what is right.
VPN are everywhere
If you have been on youtube like one of their 1.7 billion unique visits, you will have noticed the overwhelming amount of sponsored videos by VPN providers. The amount of money sponsoring videos is astonishing, literrally all content providers I watch has been sponsored by a VPN provider, even the most proud and authentic has fallen. Tom Scott even flamed VPN ads and in his recent video were sponsored by one. But I can not blame them, there is not a lot of information out there, but you supposedly can get $5k if you videos just get 150k views
The problem is that VPN are great, but you have to trust them in that they do not sell your information, and connecting through a single VPN can still easily expose you. The goverment would still be able to ask your telecom provider who connected to that VPN at that exact timestamp and the would be able to add 2 and 2 together. So VPN are a security, but it does not get your far if you are being watched.
Problems running tor exit nodes
Quickly: A tor exit node is responsible for directing the hidden traffic to its final destination. Tor hides your traffic like a onion with many layers.
There are problems running tor exit nodes, just as like any service, there is abusers and illegal use. Between all the rightful users are people misusing the tor network to do bad things like hacking and trying to take down websites.
There is also the problem of because the exit nodes terminates traffic, it looks like the exit node is a user that does the unlawful things. That means that the police can incorrectly think it is you how is doing unlawful things.
But it is not enabling crime by running a tor exit node?
No, the same way the telecom providers are not responsible because their telco attenna was used while somebody doing something illegal. https://2019.www.torproject.org/about/torusers
The tor network is growing
The network is steadily growing and since the pandemic, the amount of exit nodes has grown significant. The tor network keeps analytics here and on this chart it can be seen that around 1. jan 2020 there were 1000 exit nodes, and today there is 1500 exit nodes.
https://metrics.torproject.org/relayflags.html?start=2018-01-15&end=2022-04-15&flag=Exit
And still incrediblely 19 exit nodes as of 16. April 2022 is in Denmark, 19/1500 = 1,2% of all exit nodes, even though Denmark only has 0,07% of the worlds population.
But there is a clear signal of the exit nodes, that they are only being run by a few organizations, dotsrc is the major with a whole 10 exit nodes and a combined bandwidth adversited of 2 Gbit. Visiting one of the exit nodes ips gives the default Tor Exit Node explanation http://185.129.61.9/
And dotsrc own page describing only has 2 sentences. https://dotsrc.org/tor/ but looking into dotsrc their frontpage says they are "not-for-profit organization" and a "Free/Libre and Open Source Hosting".
But even this organization publicly talks about their problems running tor and about being banned.
Running my own Tor Exit nodes and daring
Talk is cheap and doing something is hard. I want to run a tor exit node or help run one because I know they help. Standing for something is also important, and doing something that is a little bit hard and requires some courage is not benign to me. I even think in the grand scheme running a tor exit node is not that courage, but I wouldn't dare if I lived in a dictatorship like country, where that of publishing a book or a article can get you thrown in prison.
Other things worth mentioning
Cryptohagen has meeting focus on Protecting Privacy
Labitat a danish hacker space also running exit nodes on cheap hardware