<div class="gmail_quote">On 7 March 2010 11:31, James Brown <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jbrownfirst@gmail.com">jbrownfirst@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
Many IP-addresses of exit-nodes of the Tor was banned from access to the<br>
LJ today.<br>
We have the next information when trying to connect with it:<br>
"You've been temporarily banned from accessing LiveJournal, perhaps<br>
because you were hitting the site too quickly. Please make sure that<br>
you're following our Bot Policy <<a href="http://www.livejournal.com/bots/" target="_blank">http://www.livejournal.com/bots/</a>>. If<br>
you have questions, contact us at <a href="mailto:webmaster@livejournal.com">webmaster@livejournal.com</a> with the<br>
following information: CMTGP7urjSahlts @ xx.xx.xx.xx<br>
<br>
I think that it is a new, latent method to restrict access to the LJ<br>
through the Tor which certainly established by order of Putin's and<br>
Medvedev's junta gived to the "SUP".</blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'm not sure about your conspiracy theory; it sounds like they've just implemented a new bot policy. If they really wanted to ban Tor, they could just ban all the exits. This policy does have a negative impact on those attempting to access LJ through Tor. However, it sounds like a neutral rule of general applicability: banning bots which violate your bot rules is not an unreasonable thing to do. It certainly doesn't seem that they're deliberately trying to go after Tor users in an attempt to prevent them from connecting.</div>
<div><br></div><div>In the past, when LJ has implemented measures that had negative knock-on effects on Tor, they've responded pretty positively to inquiries from the Tor developers/community. It's been my impression that they're pretty sympathetic to the anonymity needs of their users, and willing to compromise in order to meet those needs. Perhaps a fluent English-speaker could write them a polite note pointing out that this new measure (if indeed it is new) has had this unforeseen negative secondary effect, and requesting their cooperation in mitigating it.</div>
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