How to Get a Tor Project T-Shirt For Less Than $65

The Tor Project is awesome. It’s a network of volunteer proxy servers that make it possible for people to use the internet anonymously.

I decided to contribute to the Tor network by running my own exit node called gollum. I’m paying Gandi $16/month for a VPS in Paris, France. As of this writing the uptime on my Tor server is 69 days, 12 hours.

A couple days ago I was excited to receive this email from the Tor Weather service:

This is a Tor Weather Report.

Congratulations! The node gollum (id: C31E A6B0 3916 5613 464D 1B5B 6819 B36E 5529 B27C) you’ve been observing has been running as an exit node for 61 days with an average bandwidth of 1418 KB/s, which makes the operator eligible to receive an official Tor T-shirt! If you’re interested in claiming your shirt, please visit the following link for more information.

https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/tshirt.html

You might want to include this message in your email. Thank you for your contribution to the Tor network!

So for only $32 I get a Tor t-shirt. I’m sure if you find a good web host you can get one for even cheaper. Go ahead and do it! If you do, I recommend finding a web host that’s not in the United States, and that you try following these tips for running a Tor exit node with minimal harassment.

Also, there’s a really nice command line program called arm that’s useful for monitoring your Tor server. Here’s a screenshot from gollum’s arm: