This is my fourth post about #TOR, RackSpace/Slicehost and #iranelection, and I continue to have interesting discussions in emails, blog posts and their comments, and on Twitter. Here are a few updates.

Most importantly for me, Slicehost has said that they believe my current configuration should be sufficient and that they are notifying the complainants of my compliance and resolving the issue. I’m glad about this. All in all, I’ve been very pleased about Slicehost and I hope that I can work with them to make it more straight forward to get TOR up and running on a Slicehost slice. My slice is running Ubuntu, and I wrote about the initial set up in #iranelection and #TOR on #ubuntu.

In my discussion about the legal issues I ran into in More #TOR and #iranelection, J from Tequilafish wrote that he ran into a similar problem with Slicehost and has added the same Exit Policies. He also noted that he is running Fedora and has a blog post Slicehost: Setting up a Tor relay on Fedora to help keep Iran connected #IranElection. It is good to be communicating with him and I hope that many of us can work together to help establish best practices for installing TOR on Slicehost and Rackspace servers.

On Twitter, @fanclerks, who describes himself as a “Network Security Admin for Rackspace Hosting”wrote “I don't believe our AUP says anything about not allowing #Tor? I know a few Rackers run #Tor on their personal servers.” I believe that it all ends up being in how you read the AUP. As I read it, TOR should be okay. However, since you can’t control what people using TOR use your exit polices for, they could do things that are prohibited by the AUP which could put you in violation of the AUP. As a lawyer from EFF, who is also on the TOR Board of Directors said, the Terms of Service probably give Slicehost the right to terminate your account at any time for any reason. He offered to help me explain to Slicehost and why they have no legal responsibility for what comes out of a TOR node. As it stands right now, I don’t believe that is necessary, but it is great to have made contact with him.

Another friend on Twitter expressed reservations about running TOR since it can be misused. As I noted, all technology can be misused, so that argument doesn’t sway me much. He acknowledged this and talked about the benefits of use versus the costs of misuse. To me the benefit of making the Internet a little more open for people in Iran and other countries is great. To the extent that I can mitigate the costs of misuse to something like spending time trying to get people to understand a little better how TOR works and why it does not add a legal liability to a hosting service, then that is an acceptable cost. However, if the cost rises to the point of having to move to a different hosting service, then I would have to re-evaluate the cost.

One final note: I use hashmarks in my titles. This is because my titles end up getting sent to Twitter via Twitterfeed. I believe quite a few people have found my writings about this because of my use of hashmarks. However, my titles also show up on the webpage of a local newspaper. Some at the newspaper have been confused by the hashmarks. I’ve responded to them about the use of hashmarks as part of hashtags and encouraged them to learn more about twitter and hashtags. This is yet another cost benefit calculation. Right now, the benefit of using hashtags and the traffic I get from Twitter and related sites appears to significantly outweigh removing the hashtags for the benefit of the local paper. However, that too is a calculation constantly needing to be re-evaluated.

As a final comment, to those of you who are not particularly geeky or political, I apologize for the amount of technological and political posts I’ve put up recently. I do have other posts that will be coming up soon on some of the other topics I like to follow. However, I do believe this is very important and to the extent that I can communicate on this blog and elsewhere to make it easier to set up TOR Relays on Slicehost accounts, then I think I have done something very important.