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I'd like to see a better solution for CF/Tor interactions but, to be perfectly honest, Tor is too small a portion of CF's user base for them to put serious effo

I'd like to see a better solution for CF/Tor interactions but, to be perfectly honest, Tor is too small a portion of CF's user base for them to put serious effort into this and the fact their solution is more of the same seems to largely reinforce this point. I honestly refuse to use them when I have a choice in the matter because I don't have much faith in the dark mass of data that they have access will be used correctly. The fact they need to be called out publicly by the TBB team pretty much reinforces this belief.

jgrahamc 11y ago
The problem is that there isn't an easy solution to this. We have made efforts to make things better for Tor users (see my comments in the linked ticket above) but at the same time there is abuse coming from Tor which we have to deal with and we see the amount of abuse increasing. As I said in the linked thread we are about to allow our customers to whitelist Tor exit nodes so that Tor users do not get challenged when coming from an exit node that's been used for a lot of abuse. That will allow any customer to decide what's appropriate.
- bogus- 11y ago
  Thank you. That is a good first step to tackling this problem.
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  There's no easy solution because Tor refuses to do anything that would allow for anything that works within current technology. This is not a new problem. If the Tor guys really want to stop being frozen out of large parts of the internet they need to 1) Tackle abuse 2) Go work for one of the large networks for a while so they see things from the other side, and then do a lot of research until they find a solution they know can make everyone happy. In fact Tor have repeatedly gone for solution 3: 3) Attempt to publicly shame employees of big networks and get them to lower their abuse defences by implying they're idiots who hate privacy, whilst simultaneously demonstrating little understanding of what abuse teams have to deal with. This never works. Tor is a trivial fraction of anonymised traffic to most major networks (VPNs are far more popular). It can be banned entirely with ~zero impact on any large business. Taking approach (3) just annoys the employees and makes them less likely to want to donate free engineering time to the Tor project (because that's effectively what they want/need). We can see this clearly happening on the linked thread. E.g. comments like this one: It's also unreasonable to maintain a "reputation" for a Tor exit node. ... just send a powerful message that Tor isn't serious. Sorry for the harsh words, but I've been round the block on this one too. Tor want to run a network that ignores abuse yet is openly welcomed by the worlds biggest content providers. Not gonna happen.
  - nullc 11y ago
    Maybe you should go write a NYT piece announcing that Tor is a failure because it didn't adopt your preferred censorware technology (https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007167.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007...)? Surely that would be a 'better' use of your time than claiming someone who is lamenting that CF won't even return simple read-only get requests without sending even larger captcha pages first is "implying [CF are] idiots who hate privacy, whilst simultaneously demonstrating little understanding of what abuse teams have to deal with".
    - mike_hearn 11y ago
      Maybe you should dispense with ad hominem attacks and read the linked thread, where a CloudFlare employee specifically addresses the GET request idea: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361#comment:10 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361#commen... Your post is exactly what I meant by "little understanding of what abuse teams have to deal with".
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    1) Tackling abuse requires a consistent definition of abuse that transcends cultures and can be implemented without major privacy and/or censorship implications. 2) The fact I can avoid the large networks and mitigates the abuse problems simultaneously implies the issue is largely a values issue rather than a technical one about how one defines abuse. 3) 99.9999999% of the spam I have to mitigate comes from "big networks". I've literally had 1 piece of spam in 2016 come from Tor. I've only ever had DoS/DDoS from compromised servers on "big networks" who fail to notice for day(s) and require manual notification. So when you say "abuse problems", it clearly means something different to you than it does to me. 4) The "big networks" are not interested in cooperating with relatively cheap solutions like the one CF is now implementing until they are publicly called out. I asked for that 4+ years ago and was ready to move an account at $DayJob to CF until I realized how unresponsive they were.
    - mike_hearn 11y ago
- jakobdabo 11y ago
  I'm sure the Tor network can't be used to seriously DDoS CF. So the abuse of which you are talking about must be just the spam (can be unpleasant for your clients but safe for CF) and the anonymous hacking attempts (again unpleasant for the clients but safe for CF). My solution would be to not block Tor by default, instead let your clients do that if and only if they want to block it. Or, at least, let them make an informed decision when setting up the account instead of a default choice.
  - cyphar 11y ago
    I think reading information using Tor should never be disableable. Adding an option to disable it is encouraging people to remove the freedom for people to read texts anonymously. How is that a feature? It's an even more serious issue than censorship, because it's attempting to force people who use Tor into ignorance. As for writing to the site (POST), the option should be labeled "censor users in oppressed regimes". That might give it enough emotional weighting.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  I [among, apparently others based on that thread] asked for that years ago and you did nothing until you were publicly called on it. That is precisely the problem I'm talking about. Your interests aren't aligned with mine and the amount of whining required is too high for my taste, so I'm not a customer.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

jgrahamc 11y ago

The problem is that there isn't an easy solution to this. We have made efforts to make things better for Tor users (see my comments in the linked ticket above) but at the same time there is abuse coming from Tor which we have to deal with and we see the amount of abuse increasing. As I said in the linked thread we are about to allow our customers to whitelist Tor exit nodes so that Tor users do not get challenged when coming from an exit node that's been used for a lot of abuse. That will allow any customer to decide what's appropriate.

bogus- 11y ago
Thank you. That is a good first step to tackling this problem.
mike_hearn 11y ago
There's no easy solution because Tor refuses to do anything that would allow for anything that works within current technology. This is not a new problem. If the Tor guys really want to stop being frozen out of large parts of the internet they need to 1) Tackle abuse 2) Go work for one of the large networks for a while so they see things from the other side, and then do a lot of research until they find a solution they know can make everyone happy. In fact Tor have repeatedly gone for solution 3: 3) Attempt to publicly shame employees of big networks and get them to lower their abuse defences by implying they're idiots who hate privacy, whilst simultaneously demonstrating little understanding of what abuse teams have to deal with. This never works. Tor is a trivial fraction of anonymised traffic to most major networks (VPNs are far more popular). It can be banned entirely with ~zero impact on any large business. Taking approach (3) just annoys the employees and makes them less likely to want to donate free engineering time to the Tor project (because that's effectively what they want/need). We can see this clearly happening on the linked thread. E.g. comments like this one: It's also unreasonable to maintain a "reputation" for a Tor exit node. ... just send a powerful message that Tor isn't serious. Sorry for the harsh words, but I've been round the block on this one too. Tor want to run a network that ignores abuse yet is openly welcomed by the worlds biggest content providers. Not gonna happen.
- nullc 11y ago
  Maybe you should go write a NYT piece announcing that Tor is a failure because it didn't adopt your preferred censorware technology (https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007167.html https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2014-July/007...)? Surely that would be a 'better' use of your time than claiming someone who is lamenting that CF won't even return simple read-only get requests without sending even larger captcha pages first is "implying [CF are] idiots who hate privacy, whilst simultaneously demonstrating little understanding of what abuse teams have to deal with".
  - mike_hearn 11y ago
    Maybe you should dispense with ad hominem attacks and read the linked thread, where a CloudFlare employee specifically addresses the GET request idea: https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361#comment:10 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361#commen... Your post is exactly what I meant by "little understanding of what abuse teams have to deal with".
- fweespeech 11y ago
  1) Tackling abuse requires a consistent definition of abuse that transcends cultures and can be implemented without major privacy and/or censorship implications. 2) The fact I can avoid the large networks and mitigates the abuse problems simultaneously implies the issue is largely a values issue rather than a technical one about how one defines abuse. 3) 99.9999999% of the spam I have to mitigate comes from "big networks". I've literally had 1 piece of spam in 2016 come from Tor. I've only ever had DoS/DDoS from compromised servers on "big networks" who fail to notice for day(s) and require manual notification. So when you say "abuse problems", it clearly means something different to you than it does to me. 4) The "big networks" are not interested in cooperating with relatively cheap solutions like the one CF is now implementing until they are publicly called out. I asked for that 4+ years ago and was ready to move an account at $DayJob to CF until I realized how unresponsive they were.
  - mike_hearn 11y ago
jakobdabo 11y ago
I'm sure the Tor network can't be used to seriously DDoS CF. So the abuse of which you are talking about must be just the spam (can be unpleasant for your clients but safe for CF) and the anonymous hacking attempts (again unpleasant for the clients but safe for CF). My solution would be to not block Tor by default, instead let your clients do that if and only if they want to block it. Or, at least, let them make an informed decision when setting up the account instead of a default choice.
- cyphar 11y ago
  I think reading information using Tor should never be disableable. Adding an option to disable it is encouraging people to remove the freedom for people to read texts anonymously. How is that a feature? It's an even more serious issue than censorship, because it's attempting to force people who use Tor into ignorance. As for writing to the site (POST), the option should be labeled "censor users in oppressed regimes". That might give it enough emotional weighting.
fweespeech 11y ago
I [among, apparently others based on that thread] asked for that years ago and you did nothing until you were publicly called on it. That is precisely the problem I'm talking about. Your interests aren't aligned with mine and the amount of whining required is too high for my taste, so I'm not a customer.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]