-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 > With Tor soft-blocked, this problem goes away. What am I missing?
I'm not sure if you are saying "Tor is soft-blocked, so what is the problem?" or "If we soft-blocked Tor there would be no problem." So I'm going to attempt to address both. ==Tor is soft-blocked== Tor is not currently soft-blocked. It is hard-blocked along with all other anonymising services that we have been able to find. This means that if you want to edit any Wikimedia project and you want to use Tor to do it you need: * An already existing account at Wikimedia * Be either an Admin or have been given an IP Block Exemption Getting a Wikimedia account isn't hard, even through Tor. The second item though is prohibitively hard. Becoming an admin takes multiple years for many people, and getting an IPBE has the unofficial requirements of having been around a long time (think months to years), having made significant contributions, and having a demonstrated need. During the time that you are trying to fulfill those requirements you are editing without the use of Tor. This exposes the identity attached to the account and makes it non-anonymous even when you do use Tor, though using Tor would still likely provide some benefit if you needed to hide your location but not your real life identity. The current situation with Tor hard-blocked makes it near impossible to realistically edit Wikimedia projects using Tor without exposing your identity. ==Tor could be soft-blocked== Imagine the following scenario: You get blocked on Wikipedia for being abusive in a discussion. You open up Tor, create a new email address somewhere, email in requesting an account so you can edit via Tor, get the account, go back to making someone's life miserable. You can repeat this as many times as needed until they finally quit the project and you are victorious. Or this scenario: There is a discussion going on about whether or not to include a particular piece of embarassing information in an article about a particular person. There are pretty much good arguments on both sides of the discussion so its going to come down to how many folk support those arguments. The opinion you have is in the minority, but not to worry, you just, over the next two or three days, request a number of account be made and use those accounts to pitch your support for your preferred idea. Both of these would be fairly easy to detect, but they still waste valuable time and energy of folks, and both are easily expanded upon to be more effective. For scenario one: Make some of those accounts ahead of time, make a few good edits with them just to confuse folks later, and then just let them lie dormant until you need them. For scenario two: Make a few accounts slowly and keep them active. Then use them to sway discussions in one way or another. This would be really hard to detect, or at least prove, with Tor. Both of those enhancements already happen, but with Tor they would be signficantly harder to detect and block because of the lack of useful IP address information and the inability to hard-block Tor without hard-blocking all of Tor, which in the end is what was decided to be done to fix the problem. If we can find a way to make it expensive for those sorts of folks to create new accounts, expensive enough to deter all but the most crazy of the puppeteers, while still cheap enough to not deter that guy in Super-Evil-Regime, then I think that there may be some hope of changing the culture that says "Tor leads to nothing but trouble." By soft-blocking Tor instead of hard-blocking Tor, without any additional measures in place, we may be opening the flood gates to all manner of easily conceived abuse. I liked the GPG idea, and brought it back to Wikitech-l. I'll let you guys know if anyone there finds a way to completely break it. Thank you, Derric Atzrott -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (MingW32) iD8DBQFULUpqRHoDdZBwKDgRAvocAKCtpwPsOyibphrfawcPW2sn1BlItgCaA0mL iXqzJetpG4hIfVuWpcIrWo8= =1uyC -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- tor-talk mailing list - [email protected] To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
