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Ask HN: Why are you blocking users from the Tor network?

37 points by conductor 13y ago

When accessing the Hacker News through the Tor network, in the vast majority of cases (exit nodes) you will get "HTTP/1.1 403 Begone!". I'm not suggesting anything, but the timing of this restriction is not very good: it started just after the NSA hit the fan. HN, if the reason behind this restriction is that you sipmly don't want anonymous postings then let us (Tor users) just browse the Hacker News at least. Thank you.

kybernetyk 13y ago
> it started just after the NSA hit the fan. IIRC this was longer the case.
pg 13y ago
Someone wrote an abusive distributed crawler that got a lot of Tor IP addresses banned.
- conductor 13y ago
  Thank you for the fast response! Well, this is sad. I just hope when the crawler stops abusing HN, the banned IP addresses will be unbanned back after some time.
  - pg 13y ago
    Yes, such bans only last a few days.
gesman 13y ago
I ran hosting server and Tor users are usually script kiddies trying to mess with the system. I tired of this bullshit and disabled Tor on the level of IPTABLES. I suspect HN and others did the same, not because they are against the freedom, but just because it makes easier to conduct the business.