Foundation for Applied Privacy

Today some unknown email address offered us around 32 000 euro for our tor exit relays - depending on our exit probability.

We are not for sale but we take your donations 😉 https://applied-privacy.net/donate/

If anyone from Hetzners network team is at #39C3 we would like to talk to you about something that has been bothering tor relay operators on your network.

We are replacing our ~10 year old Intel Xeon servers with a single server using an AMD EPYC CPU with 64 cores to increase power efficiency.

We are grateful for every donation that helps us cover the one time hardware costs.
https://applied-privacy.net/donate/

Today starting around 2026-01-23 16:15 CET we will do some hardware maintenance affecting all our tor exit relays.

Our DNS services should not be affected.

@ahf@mastodon.social very much appreciated, thank you!

You can find our slides from the relay operators meetup at #37C3 here: https://applied-privacy.net/files/2023-12-29_37C3_Tor_Relay_Meetup.pdf

Starting with today
our DNS over HTTPS service supports HTTP/2 only (no more HTTP/1.1).

Background: We upgraded to
to dnsdist v1.9.3.

Important announcement for our DNS over HTTPS service users:

We will stop supporting HTTP/1.1 DoH requests soon and support HTTP/2 DoH requests only.

Expect this to happen as soon as dnsdist version 1.9.3 reaches FreeBSD package repos.

Yesterday we upgraded our public DoH server from dnsdist 1.8.3 to 1.9.0 which resulted in a partial service outage for some of our users due to an issue in dnsdist.

We downgraded to version 1.8.3 today and our DoH service should be back to normal.

The PowerDNS developers assume this was:
https://github.com/PowerDNS/pdns/issues/13850

There will be three different Tor meetups tomorrow at #37c3

Last night we had a 30min outage
between 2026-01-05 01:15-01:45 which made our tor relays and website unreachable.

Root Cause: BIRD configuration change resulted in BIRD crashes -> BGP down.

We reached out to the BIRD developers.

Our DNS services were not affected.

On 2025-12-17 we improved our routing security posture by creating our RPKI ASPA object.

Today we started to use ASPA objects to validate announcements - currently in monitoring mode only.

We will be at the #39C3
Tor Relay Operators Meetup
https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/en/event/detail/tor-relay-operators-meetup
You can also reach us via Signal:
https://applied-privacy.net/contact/

Between 2025-12-23 ~20:30 and 21:11 UTC our DNS resolver services were not reachable as usual. This was caused by our transition to our new hardware.
The issue has been solved.

Today we are moving all our tor instances to our AMD EPYC server.
In this process about half of them will get a new IP address.

Our Metaday 104 slides are now online and available here:
https://applied-privacy.net/files/2025-03-14_Metaday_104.pdf

Our @ripencc@mastodon.social Atlas Probe has been online for the past 5 years :)

We see unusually high DNS timeout rates on our tor exit relays since 2024-03-31 and we confirmed this is not a local issue by comparing graphs with a fellow large scale tor exit relay operator.

If you collect prometheus metrics of your exit relays make sure to have a look at this graph:

sum(irate(tor_relay_exit_dns_error_total{reason="tor_timeout"}[$__rate_interval]))

Thanks to a Tor MetricsPort feature we requested last August, we now get to see how often we hit Tor Bugs in our Grafana Dashboard :)

and there appears to be an issue with this new counter
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/tor/-/issues/40924