8 ms·
Ask HN: Why block Tor?
Didn't we like privacy?
- frantzmiccoli 10y agoIt works ok here!
- curiousgal 10y agoTo avoid vote manipulation and spam I reckon.
- ffggvv 10y agoAren't new accounts limited?
- dbg31415 10y agoWho really cares that much about internet points?
- dasil003 10y agoAnyone who cares about what's on the front page, which includes many people who aren't even logged in.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- corysama 10y agoSpammers and similar people who want to abuse HN to artificially promote something.
- koolba 10y ago... Says the guy with only 162!
- dbg31415 10y agoI think down votes are toxic, just utterly useless as a signal. Why enable people to be petty? I think HN has a serious case of "we take ourselves too seriousky" -- there shouldn't be a penalty for making a joke on a website.
- koolba 10y agoI never said they're toxic. Heck I love them and probably use them as much as upvotes.
- geofft 10y agoStartups that get visitors if they're on the front page? Like there is a clear connection between "internet points", as you call them, and revenue.
- edoceo 10y agoI use applicants HN score, and comments as hiring factors.
- dcole2929 10y agoThat seems like a terrible idea. Unless you're hiring for a user facing role, one's personal opinions should have very little bearing on their hireablility. It's a number that literally means nothing. Hell you can get down voted for having perfectly logical contrary opinions (e.g. any thread involving politics, diversity or Microsoft). This is something you do if you're just are looking for people who think exactly the way you do. Personally I refuse to provide any company with material that can link back to my personal social sites. It's simply not worth it. I'm not going to sanitize my digital life for the purposes of getting hired. I don't even provide links to my github because people read too much into what is or isn't there trying to parse out some signal that doesn't actually exist.
- edoceo 10y agoI'm not asking anyone to sanitize. I look for folks who can clearly argue their point. It's the quality of the debate, not the value of the position
- koolba 10y agoIt's not though. If you're not arguing a pro-groupthink position you'll get down voted regardless of the quality of your commentary. See just about any politics related thread for an example of that. Note that only applies to subjective topics. If you're commenting about a purely technical topic then the voting system does seem to work more effectively.
- edoceo 10y agoTo be clear. If one candidate has an HN rank of 10 and another has a rank of 100 it doesn't automatically place them ahead. That would be stupid. Nor does having downvotes cause any automatic placement adjustment. I review their comments manually to tell me about the person. It's a qualitative evaluation, not purely quantitative.
- tiernano 10y agoIs it not a cloud flare issue? Hn is behind cloudflare, and cloudflare thinks it's a problem... last time I tried, it's requests verification each time, as do other cloudflare backed sites (my own included)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- anexprogrammer 10y agoCloudflare is horrifically hostile to users, triggering blocks and Captchas all the damn time, but I've never once had an issue, or cloudflare interruption, with HN. It'd give me an interesting conflict if I ever had, as I take Cloudflare captchas as a huge negative indicator of trust.
- curiousgal 10y agoIn fairness, Cloudflare's CTO did engage with the Tor folks for quite some time. https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361 https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361
- anexprogrammer 10y agoWell there was something on Github of a browser addon to mitigate the worst of the challenges, back in summer. I remember it hitting front page here. Seemed hopeful a solution was on the horizon. It seems to have been untouched since, and no sign of an actual solution... Now the UK is stepping up surveillance silliness I use the VPN rather more, and expect many others are, or will. Which today just means endless unintelligently implemented CAPTCHAs.
- garrettr_ 10y ago> It seems to have been untouched since, and no sign of an actual solution... They're working on it! There will be a talk about this about Real World Crypto 2017 in January, see "Solving the Cloudflare CAPTCHA" on the RWC program: http://www.realworldcrypto.com/rwc2017/program http://www.realworldcrypto.com/rwc2017/program.
- 3131s 10y agoI've posted on HN via Tor without issue in the recent past.
- gus_massa 10y agoIIRC HN only blocks Tor for recently created accounts, but perhaps HN has a more complex criteria. For more details, you can try contacting the mods hn@ycombinator.com (from a throwaway email?)
- colejohnson66 10y agoI thought it was a shadow ban on new accounts. You need people to vouch for you to get out, right?
- dang 10y agoNot for most new accounts, no. A small minority of new accounts' comments get autokilled because of past abuse by trolls, and those often get rescued by vouches.
- tor_lurker 10y agoAs a non-logged in lurker, I always get "prove you're legit" when using TBB. I usually hit the "new tor circuit for this site" button a few times until it goes away. It is really annoying how to even read HN you need to jump through hoops. I can possibly understand commenting and posting being restricted, but there's not reason to block simple views, it's not like anyone is going to use tor for ddos.
- LeifCarrotson 10y ago> it's not like anyone is going to use tor for ddos. Perhaps not DDOS, but yes, tor is absolutely used maliciously: > Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network. Source: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/ Counterpoint: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trouble-cloudflare https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trouble-cloudflare
- flashman 10y agoPosting via Tor now. I had to complete a reCAPTCHA before I was allowed to see the page, but no problems on logging in. Exit relay 89.234.157.254. I don't usually use Tor but I thought I'd test what OP's saying.
- dang 10y agoWe changed the title from "Why HN Blocks Tor?" because HN doesn't block Tor. Plenty of users read HN and post to HN using Tor every day, including some in this thread. There have been issues in the past with Cloudflare and Tor, but I don't know what the current status of that is. Certainly they aren't blocking everybody, or we wouldn't see them. The one thing HN itself does is moderate comments from brand new accounts that are posted using Tor. We do this because of past abuses by trolls. However, when such comments are good they routinely get restored by users using the 'vouch' feature, or, failing that, we often restore them ourselves. So even this isn't much of a restriction. The main problem is that it makes for a time delay between when a (good) comment gets posted and when other users get to see it.
- guilhas 10y agoHow can HN identify they are behind Tor?
- Noctem 10y agoThe IP addresses of Tor exit nodes are publicly available.
- Godel_unicode 10y agoYou might be interested in this listing from the Tor project: https://check.torproject.org/exit-addresses https://check.torproject.org/exit-addresses
- FellowTraveler 10y agoWhat is the Tor .onion address for hacker news? That's what I'm interested in, I'll add it to my bookmarks and use it by default. I don't see why we want to involve exit nodes at all.
- maxt 10y agoSometimes I get roadblocked from viewing Hackernews when using TOR. I say sometimes, because I normally have to change my identity/location to view HN's frontpage (whilst logged out). It can become a hit or miss type scenario where the HN servers are not as strict upon my third, or usually fourth identity and allow TOR traffic through.
- swyman 10y ago90% of our Tor traffic was script kiddies
- vabmit 10y agoI block tor from many of my servers. I started noticing that whenever I had an issue with someone attacking a server the source traced back to an exit node. What I found when I looked at the traffic coming from the exit nodes was that the vast majority of it was malicious. There was a massive amount of automated password guessing, exploit attempts, and attempt to connect to botnet controllers/backdoors. I'm all for anonymity. However, until the tor project puts some effort into outbound traffic filtering for exit nodes it is too much of a time sink and headache not to just blackhole it all on servers that either do not serve public content or where anonymity really isn't needed/justifiable. I put the code I use to block tor exit nodes in the public domain. You can download it here: https://github.com/vab/torblock https://github.com/vab/torblock
- maxt 10y agoThere's underblocking and overblocking. Underblocking is allowing TOR traffic through, but also letting TOR traffic flood your servers. It's obvious that if you have a flood of nefarious traffic like this then you should throttle the TOR traffic. Overblocking is outright blocking TOR with no reason other than because you can, and it leaves many legitimate users frustrated and feeling like the site just self-censored itself. It would be suitable in these cases to strike a happy medium and allow some TOR traffic through, but throttle suspicious-looking requests like mini 'swarms' of TOR exit IPs hitting the site all at once, which I think HN does, because some TOR idens work, whilst others do not.