A server without disks can just as easily serve files as it can run a Tor node.

I fail to see how this solves any problem or is useful deterrence of the police seizing your box.

> I fail to see how this solves any problem or is useful deterrence of the police seizing your box.

It's not a deterrence to seizing the box. It's a deterrence to finding anything on the box after seizing it.

And the arms race continues. I expect this will work only as long as law enforcement doesn't recognize it's a ram only box, after which they'd just keep it plugged in or drop it into liquid nitrogen to preserve the bits if they cared enough.

Easier said than done, power can be cut in an instant or even automatically (triggered by unauthorized entrance to a facility, for example).

Dynamic ram refresh intervals are mindbogglingly conservative, especially if you're not running near the upper-temperature limit. In other words, DRAM doesn't lose information anywhere near as fast as the refresh intervals might suggest.

If they get to it in time, that probably won't matter: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/22/technology/22chip.html

It will give a whole new meaning for when cops shout "Freeze!".

Yes, and I would rather have law enforcement find nothing incriminating on my harddisk than being accused of obfuscation or destroying of evidence (this might be FUD).

So, these days I need to run my tor box on a ramdisk, which has its RAM kept nice and warm, and has its power cut automatically by the intruder alarm. Just so I know where things stand.

If I'm gonna go rigging things up to alarm systems, may as well just set up a thermite reaction TBH.

Now, how hard would it be to design a sort of minimal virtual machine that can run this in parallel with e.g. a Windows host OS? Distribute it via some existing delivery vector, et voila...

Never thought uClinux would be used for such purpose.

Perfect! Combine with your choice of the following for plug-n-play subversion:

  http://www.linuxfordevices.com/c/a/News/Linux-system-squishes-into-Ethernet-connector/
  http://pwnieexpress.com/
  http://www.gumstix.com/
  http://www.raspberrypi.org/

in case of search, wouldn't law enforcement agency seize ALL your equipment, not just the one box you point them to saying: "here's my diskless tor relay. take it!" ?

So? The idea is not to protect your browsing habits. It's to protect the users of your node. They won't leave a (permanent) trace. Of course if they go for your devices they can look at your disks and see what _you_ were doing. Different thing though.

The important thing is storing the ssl key in a secure manner.