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I grew up in a country where the Internet was censored and I have been a Tor user since the days of the dangerous toggle button in Firefox. So it's been like 7-

I grew up in a country where the Internet was censored and I have been a Tor user since the days of the dangerous toggle button in Firefox. So it's been like 7-8 years? I hope I can offer a counter argument. This is not "business" as much as it is about CloudFlare centralizing the Internet around them. We should speak up against it and rightly so. When I started using Tor, it was the only way I could access the free Internet. You mention VPN, VPNs may be popular but not everyone can pay for them or afford them or even has a credit card in many countries. With CloudFlare running on many websites, it has become impossible to read any content on them because the CAPTCHAs are impossible to solve or are a nuisance (who has figured out what a street sign is?). And while Tor gives users to access the internet freely for zero cost, CloudFlare is helping doing the opposite of that. And please suggest what should an open network do about abuse and rather, why should they be the ones doing anything about it? Not to mention, what kind of abuse would reading an article constitute? I am not even logging in, just reading stuff has been made impossible due to CloudFlare.

mike_hearn 11y ago
I have the utmost respect for people fighting censorship, whether they're on the inside breaking out or on the outside breaking in. But the idea that only Tor can be used to fight censorship is a false equivalence. If you look at the usage data for e.g. Turkey when they stepped up censorship a few years ago, Tor usage increased a bit, but it was a tiny amount compared to HotSpot Shield (a VPN product). Most users evading censorship in places like China or Turkey are happy to trust the VPN provider in return for superior performance or app compatibility, because they know little VPN providers aren't going to snitch them out. Yes, normally people have to pay for VPNs whereas Tor is free. I think it'd be great if there was a collaborative network of people who donate their bandwidth to a kind of decentralised VPN (single hop, authenticated, with abuse checks, unlike Tor). But ultimately running these sorts of networks takes effort and time, and most organisations don't have access to the various grants and such that Tor has. > please suggest what should an open network do about abuse and rather, why should they be the ones doing anything about it Keep it under control, same as all other networks are expected to do. There are all sorts of networks that range from very closed (e.g. university networks) to very open (e.g. open signup clouds, Google, Microsoft email networks etc). But none of them have a get-out-of-jail-free card, not even the biggest. Why should they be the ones to do anything about it - because that's how the internet works. If your network spews abuse onto the platform then it's gonna get blocked and blacklisted. If you don't want your users to all be lumped in the same bucket, then you have to do the differentiation yourself. The linked thread already explains why simple GET requests can be problematic all by themselves.

mike_hearn 11y ago

I have the utmost respect for people fighting censorship, whether they're on the inside breaking out or on the outside breaking in. But the idea that only Tor can be used to fight censorship is a false equivalence. If you look at the usage data for e.g. Turkey when they stepped up censorship a few years ago, Tor usage increased a bit, but it was a tiny amount compared to HotSpot Shield (a VPN product). Most users evading censorship in places like China or Turkey are happy to trust the VPN provider in return for superior performance or app compatibility, because they know little VPN providers aren't going to snitch them out. Yes, normally people have to pay for VPNs whereas Tor is free. I think it'd be great if there was a collaborative network of people who donate their bandwidth to a kind of decentralised VPN (single hop, authenticated, with abuse checks, unlike Tor). But ultimately running these sorts of networks takes effort and time, and most organisations don't have access to the various grants and such that Tor has. > please suggest what should an open network do about abuse and rather, why should they be the ones doing anything about it Keep it under control, same as all other networks are expected to do. There are all sorts of networks that range from very closed (e.g. university networks) to very open (e.g. open signup clouds, Google, Microsoft email networks etc). But none of them have a get-out-of-jail-free card, not even the biggest. Why should they be the ones to do anything about it - because that's how the internet works. If your network spews abuse onto the platform then it's gonna get blocked and blacklisted. If you don't want your users to all be lumped in the same bucket, then you have to do the differentiation yourself. The linked thread already explains why simple GET requests can be problematic all by themselves.