Over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying to work out a reasonable resolution to the DMCA problem with a representative of Rackspace (the parent company of Slicehost, my hosting provider). While they are resolute that the downloading of copyrighted material from my server was a violation of the terms of service, they don’t object to the Tor relay itself, so as long as I take some appropriate measures to prevent further downloading, I’m free to restart the relay. But apparently, port blocking is an appropriate measure… even though it doesn’t actually do very much to prevent BitTorrent downloading. So I guess it’s a question of appeasing the authorities — appearance over function.