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> I know Tor doesn't want to be in the network regulation business, but .... That is exactly why there is a Tor. Tor is for enabling anonymous communication. N

• scurvy 11y ago
  It's not a binary thing. You can regulate out fraud, abuse, and DDoS attacks without harming the legitimate use cases. It's like selling alcohol (cigarettes, porn, gambling), but not to minors. You can say "it's OK for this crowd not OK for this crowd". Otherwise you'd probably claim that said regulation would go against the very thing that the merchant is trying to do: make as much money as possible.
  • dublinben 11y ago
    >You can regulate out fraud, abuse, and DDoS attacks without harming the legitimate use cases. How? If you think this was possible without completely compromising the Tor protocol, don't you think it would have been done already?
  • Etzos 11y ago
    It's very easy to say that one can filter out certain things, but in practice I think it's far more difficult. Especially in Tor's case where the goal is to provide truly anonymous access. Do you have a proposal for filtering out that kind of traffic while allowing other traffic? I can't think of a way off the top of my head and I'm sure the people behind Tor would at least consider a logical solution. Edit: This sounds kind of confrontational, but I don't mean it like that. I honestly would like to hear of a potential solution to this because I really can't think of one.
  • Spearchucker 11y ago
    "It's like selling alcohol (cigarettes, porn, gambling), but not to minors." It's not like that at all, because selling to everyone other than minors requires identity. Sure, you just need to verify the subject is over 18, i.e. you don't need to know name, birth date or address. But you DO need to know identity to issue the token that provisions the token that proves an age > 18. And that breaks Tor's raison d'être.
  • baldfat 11y ago
    > It's not a binary thing. Well the thing is how do you regulate totally anonymous users? How would you know what the binary 0 and 1 are doing in tor?
• eeeeeeeeeeeee 11y ago
  Definitely, but they shouldn't complain when the public Internet (Cloudflare) blocks them or views their traffic differently. Anonymity comes at a price, and this is one of them. I think TOR is an important project, but this blog post by them is completely ridiculous and ignores reality. Why should TOR get a pass on this when network operators need to protect their network from abuse? The choices are either 1) let the abuse continue or 2) try to block the specific attack traffic in question by heuristics which is often difficult or impossible or 3) block abusive IP addresses.
  • jcoffland 11y ago
    Complain is exactly what they should do. People should care about privacy even when it's other people's privacy.
    • zaphar 11y ago
      No one's privacy is being violated here. The right to privacy is not the same thing as the right to access. If someone doesn't want to allow you anonymous access it is their right to block you. Anyone using CF and not whitelisting Tor is effectively saying. If you want to visit my site you need to verify that you aren't a bad actor. If you don't want to do that because of privacy reasons then you can't visit.
    • jessaustin 11y ago
      Haha if CF get this kind of response to their gentle observations I'd hate to see what a frank honest complaint would get...