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Tor provides anonymity without accountability; having some doors closed to all Tor users is the price paid for that anonymity. If that price isn’t acceptable, e
by floatingatoll 5y ago
Tor provides anonymity without accountability; having some doors closed to all Tor users is the price paid for that anonymity. If that price isn’t acceptable, either modify Tor to allow more granular accountability in some privacy-protecting way, or don’t use Tor when accessing services that are closed to it.
- yanmaani 5y agoI can use more or less all other websites with Tor fine, though. It's only Stack Overflow that insists on this nonsense. On most other sites, including this one, I can even make an account and post. Is their site really so sensitive as to make reading with Tor impossible?
- rmbyrro 5y agoGood question. They might be trying to fight SPAM or else. Could just block posting, commenting and up/down voting...
- james-redwood 5y agoTor generally doesn't work on Google services.
- jbentham 5y agoIs this actually true? I've often used Tor to access Google Docs and Google Maps and to my knowledge have never had a problem. In fact, I'm not even presented with Captchas.
- bigyellow 5y ago
- zozbot234 5y agoYMMV. Google Search might as well be blocked completely, I guess they don't want to deal with all the SEO-targeting search queries that would otherwise come from Tor.
- wanderer_ 5y agoI guess they could just not generate any data from your searches, but I guess that defeats the purpose, now doesn't it? :)
- alexb_ 5y agoIf "fine" means "answering a new captcha every time you blink" then yeah, every other website works fine on Tor.
- yanmaani 5y agoIn my experience, this has gotten better. That was CloudFlare, and they've stopped now. I can't think of a single site that requires CAPTCHAs for Tor users other than archive.is, actually.
- foxfluff 5y agoarchive.is wastes your time on captchas even if you're not using tor
- floatingatoll 5y agoarchive.is requires captchas for iCloud Relay users as well as blocking Cloudflare DNS users, so I wouldn’t consider them to be a Tor-specific example.
- raxi 5y agoAlmost all torrent sites. Generally, "data" sites which people love to scrape and think that Tor is a good tool for that
- fought4thots 5y ago> Is their site really so sensitive as to make reading with Tor impossible? Very much so, strange if people here don't understand that, even at the best of times APT's could be discovered down the track by their SO queries, now compare today, with heightened tensions and certain nuclear armed superpowers talking about going to war with each other. How is this even slightly surprising? SO is vital shit, if you don't agree feel free to null route the site the next time you have a major incident at work :)
- yanmaani 5y agoThere are public dumps of all the questions and answers; you'd imagine that anyone paranoid enough simply runs a local mirror.
- jbentham 5y agoAre you actually suggesting that SO/SE are blocking Tor because they intend to track all of their users by their IP addresses (or browser metadata), using national security as a justification? I still do not understand how blocking Tor helps here. People who are concerned about their security will either use mirror sites, or use data dumps such as what is available at archive.org, or simply not use the SO/SE content at all. The number of users who will abandon Tor and the protection it provides for the express purpose of visiting SO/SE is negligible. This move will not increase the number of persons who see SO/SE adverts or who are trackable by SO/SE. It will also not decrease the number of persons who will be able to access SO/SE content. So I continue to be mystified about the rationale behind this policy change.
- asmr 5y agoPlease define "fine", a majority of websites and services either outright block Tor or severely limit the traffic.
- hereforphone 5y agoIs avoiding accountability the whole point of anonymity?
- CaptainJustin 5y agoFor me anonymity can be a part of my privacy posture.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jbentham 5y agoIf by 'accountability' you mean the ability for site ops to unilaterally de-anonymise Tor users, then no; Tor users will never agree to that. If SE executives are really concerned about spam and vandalism by anonymous actors, then SE could Tor users to post assets in escrow (e.g. Monero) before posting. Similarly, if SE executives are concerned about denial-of-service attacks, then SE could rate-limit the sites that are causing the attacks; Tor is not efficient for that kind of attack anyway. There is no sound argument that blocking Tor entirely would further the interests of SE users. This is the act of a monopolist in secular decline.
- jbentham 5y agoIf by 'accountability' you mean the ability for site ops to unilaterally de-anonymise Tor users, then no; Tor users will never agree to that. If SE executives are really concerned about spam and vandalism by anonymous actors, then SE could Tor users to post assets in escrow (e.g. Monero) before posting. Similarly, if SE executives are concerned about denial-of-service attacks, then SE could rate-limit the sites that are causing the attacks; Tor is not efficient for that kind of attack anyway. There is no sound argument that blocking Tor entirely would further the interests of SE users. A site looking to grow its influence would be more concerned with attracting new users than repelling them. This is the act of a monopolist in secular decline.
- fabian2k 5y agoThis is not the spam or vandalism counter-measure, those work differently and only block posting to the sites. And you can avoid them if you establish a reputable account, they won't affect you anymore then.
- jbentham 5y agoIf it is not to block spam, or vandalism, or denial-of-service attacks, then what is the purpose of this new policy? To your other point, how can one establish a 'reputable account' if it is not even possible to access the site in the first instance.
- 5y ago
- capableweb 5y agoI could understand Stack Overflow blocking access to register/signup for Tor users to avoid abuse, as sometimes spammers use Tor, so that kind of makes sense. But not allowing Tor users to not even read the website? What's the justification for that? You couldn't even perform DDOS over Tor as the network speed is too slow, so Tor activity can't even be a blimp in terms of usage activity for logged out users, so what's the deal here?
- fyzix 5y agoThere's no such thing as "granular accountability". It's binary...there's no in-between.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoOf course there is. It depends on who might know you're on a certain website for example. My wife vs my best bud for example. One would hold me a lot more to account for some websites for example whereas my buddy couldn't care less.
- fouc 5y agoIt might be interesting to have some sort of cryptographic identity that costs money to generate, and then gets associated with tor in some anonymity-safe way. But the identity would would need to somehow remain unidentifiable, so maybe that's not an identity after all. Tor has enough trouble with maintaining anonymity as is, with the lack of trust in the various routers because government runs many nodes in an attempt to identify tor users.