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I've run forums for a long time and bullying surfaces frequently. Most trolls use Tor nowadays. Only very rarely do I get traceable IP addresses that can be de
by buro9 15y ago
I've run forums for a long time and bullying surfaces frequently. Most trolls use Tor nowadays.
Only very rarely do I get traceable IP addresses that can be dealt with in any meaningful way, and that's usually when there is an invasion of trolls for a day or two and some drop their guard.
The only time I've ever successfully stopped a troll was about a decade ago when I traced it back to a uni and was able to raise a sysadmin.
By and large, for the majority of forums and social sites out there (which is where most bullying happens) there is very little that the admins can do even if it's reported to us.
About the only thing working is stopforumspam.com , whereby hundreds of forums are blocking IP addresses for a short while across all of the forums. It's made for spam, but I and others submit trolls to it too (when we're absolutely sure there's nothing of worth in the person and it's not just differing views).
- JoachimSchipper 15y agoTor is nice, but how long will it take until textual analysis against a large corpus becomes available to everyone with an interest? We already have fairly advanced plagiarism detection mechanisms and Bayesian spam filters; similar ideas allow author-identification. I would, in fact, be somewhat surprised if nobody has proposed deploying this kind of thing against, say, Anonymous.
- dlss 15y agoTrolls don't generally write enough for these approaches to work. From the article, we have a troll writing "Rest in piss" and "Rest in piss, you n*r". I'm pretty sure those won't personally identify anyone.
- blake8086 15y agoSomeone could use the exact same technique to write something and have it be attributed to someone else. Say you use an n-gram analysis at the word level. I can just build a tool that processes a corpus, and then as I type, suggests the most probable next word for me. I can simply accept those words when appropriate and look like a different person.
- joshu 15y agoFWIW we ended up tracking TOR exit nodes on Delicious, and then we used "account created on tor" as a flag to the bayesian.
- tricolon 15y agoWhat is the best way to track TOR exit nodes?
- Monotoko 15y agoThere's a nice updating list here: http://proxy.org/tor.shtml http://proxy.org/tor.shtml
- joshu 15y agothere's a DNSBL. i believe it's possible to run a node and just query it for the exit nodes, but I'm not sure.
- zargon 15y agoTor (not TOR) uses directory servers to keep track of middle and exit nodes. You can get the list directly or via a variety of front-ends. See https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en#Bans https://www.torproject.org/docs/faq-abuse.html.en#Bans
- kanamekun 15y agoThat's a really clever way to incorporate TOR as an input, without just disabling all TOR-enabled accounts. Were you able to get a bayesian algorithm to learn whether specific users were likely to be spammers or trolls? (As opposed to specific posts.) I'm guessing this isn't easy to do, since I get spammed on other services on a regular basis (e.g. Twitter spammers will setup new accounts and spam on a regular basis).