I've seen lots of postings from Grarpamp and I feel sure that I'm never going to change any opinions that Grarpamp holds; but what I do want to raise with everyone is "the possibility of change":
To a good approximation, literally *zero* percent of the organisations which will benefit from "Opportunistic Onions" have ever used Onion Services until now However literally 100% of the websites who can benefit from "Opportunistic Onions" are Cloudflare customers by choice, who choose to trust Cloudflare with their traffic, and I respect the choices of the website owners to select different ways of scaling their services and of keeping their systems safe from being DDoS'ed. The people who *use* those websites can and should make their feelings known to the website owners; but the opinions they feed back should be balanced and considered and up-to-date and fair. Yes, there is much to criticise of Cloudflare's past approach towards Tor (including tweets by the CEO) but as I have also said so many times before: it's amazing what a little engagement and mutual respect will achieve. To go back through my own history at Facebook Engineering, the turning point was this Reddit post from June 2013: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1gkxje/facebook_blocks_logins_from_tor_browser_putting/ ...where one of Facebook's IP reputation systems burped after eating some new config software, and blocked a large number of Tor exit nodes. The civil society & reddit communities started commenting at speed, flaming Facebook for "censorship"; and I had to argue against my own management, some of whom suggested "why not just block Tor totally?" - because it apparently caused nothing but vitriol and bad headlines. I said "Give me a chance" and pinged Runa Sandvik (who was then at Tor) asking her on behalf of Tor to explain the situation to the world: https://blog.torproject.org/facebook-and-tor quote> A number of users have noticed that Facebook is blocking connections from the Tor network. Facebook is not blocking Tor deliberately. However, a high volume of malicious activity across Tor exit nodes triggered Facebook's site integrity systems which are designed to protect people who use the service. Tor and Facebook are working together to find a resolution. ...and the anger faded. People were nonplussed: Facebook had merely goofed. Facebook was working with Tor to "fix things". As I think one commenter put it: "What do I do with this pitchfork, now?" The important thing is what happened next: This single event - proving that it was possible to get constructive assistance from Tor - was enough to provide me traction for the concept of building a Facebook onion site; I started building it 1 year later (needed to learn some stuff, first) and launched it 3 months after that. It's no coincidence that Runa subsequently helped with testing & launching facebookcorewwwi, nor that three years later the New York Times launched its own onion site. I am sure that there are lots of people here who hate Facebook too - and that's okay; my point is that without constructive engagement we would probably not be where we are today, with Onion SSL Certificates, with an official ".onion" top-level domain, with a increasing number of "respectable" onion websites which are putting the lie to the "Dark Web" mythos. Tor, and Onion Networking, is just the "More Secure Web"; and you grow it by giving people and companies the opportunities and space to engage with it, so that they can offer value to others. tl;dr - Tor will grow by engagement and reconciliation, not by rehashing old debates and historical enmities. - alec -- http://dropsafe.crypticide.com/aboutalecm -- tor-talk mailing list - tor-talk@lists.torproject.org To unsubscribe or change other settings go to https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk
