Exit Nodes in restricted countries

Question

The British government has recently announced plans to require censoring of "terrorist" and "extremist" websites ⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾. It seems UK residents may soon find themselves joining the ranks of those needing to use Tor more regularly for accessing content that the government may deem too extreme.

If those of us running exit nodes in the UK end up having our own access restricted then anybody elsewhere trying to access blocked content will end up with the same problem by proxy _{^{(no pun intended)}}, no matter where they are in the world.

Extrapolating a bit, I begin to wonder about countries with similar blocks elsewhere in the world. Is it even worth running an exit node if there's a chance Tor users will just end up getting blocked when trying to access content that they're trying to use Tor to view in the first place?

This question discusses options for DNS-level blocks, but if things go a level deeper and IPs (or even blocks of IPs) are blocked then what can we do with our exit nodes?

Answer 1

The sad part about those exit nodes is that they don't know about where they can't go and if they don't know they can't tell clients in advance that there exit will be not working for them.

Since the ISP is messing with the traffic, e.g. showing a website that tells one an error occurred or that they are indeed blocking the destination those nodes would get the BadExit flag as it is irrelevant who is messing with the traffic.

BadExit's will not be used as exits. This, not for human intended, protocol shows all BadExits. Luckily there's a list for humans provided via Globe.

Arguably the nodes would be relevant for some people, but exits are supposed to be useful for anyone, unless the exit policy excludes ports or destinations.