I spotted them before, but why the hell on google? Seems like google spotted em and terminated servers ?
Might just be Google Cloud.
Similar to AWS, Azure, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud and others, anybody can rent a host and run anything they want.
I wouldn’t run tor with any of those providers though as bandwidth to the internet (egress) can be quite costly.
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Agreed. My guess is that it wasn’t that Google spotted them and got rid of them. My guess is that whoever set up the relays did it once and turned them off again soon after.
That said, they are bizarre-looking relays: they’re running Windows, and they claim to have handled a huge amount of throughput already, yet in their extrainfo descriptors they write:
write-history 2021-12-11 03:57:36 (86400 s) 0
read-history 2021-12-11 03:57:36 (86400 s) 0
So either it is a bug of some sort (they’re on Windows and there are not many relays on Windows so it is possible) or an attempt at an attack (which wouldn’t work well because relays need to get measured by the bandwidth authorities before clients will use them). One plausible explanation is that it’s some curious-but-mostly-benign researcher messing around wondering what happens when they modify their Tor.
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