[tor-bugs] #18361 [Tor Browser]: Issues with corporate censorship and mass surveillance

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#18361: Issues with corporate censorship and mass surveillance
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 Reporter:  ioerror                       |          Owner:  tbb-team
     Type:  enhancement                   |         Status:  new
 Priority:  High                          |      Milestone:
Component:  Tor Browser                   |        Version:
 Severity:  Critical                      |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  security, privacy, anonymity  |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                                |         Points:
  Sponsor:                                |
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Comment (by ioerror):

 Replying to [comment:36 jgrahamc]:
 > Replying to [comment:34 ioerror]:
 > > In any case - I think we all agree that there is a serious problem
 here and we should involve our communities and not just have backroom
 communications that do not result in differences for users. There are
 millions of impacted users who are being censored from reading websites
 because of a combination of issues - every single day.
 >
 > I don't agree with your characterization of this as "censoring". That
 implies an active desire to prevent people from reaching certain types of
 content. Given all that we've done to uphold free speech in the face of a
 barrage of criticism I think your use of the word "censor" is unwarranted.

 I don't agree with the characterization of this as mere "blocking" when CF
 prevents users from *reading* websites. I haven't even begun to describe
 the pain of having written lengthy comments only to hit a captcha loop and
 it censored my *speech* as well.

 It is censorship from where many of our users stand. Some of our Chinese
 users refer to it as the Great Distributed Firewall that they hit after
 jumping over the other Great Firewall.

 Forgive me for not knowing the other details about Cloudflare and Free
 Speech - I'm not at all trying to characterize those activities. The
 active blocking, captcha loop issues are seriously problematic and they
 have a *result* which is that websites are unreadable. I'm not claiming
 you're burning books or something silly. I'm correctly pointing out that
 the books are safely on the otherside of a locked door and we're being
 turned into captcha solving machines that often do not unlock the door, if
 you'll forgive the metaphor.

 >
 > > I encourage you to use the Tor Browser for a week and report back to
 us about how well it works for you. If your experience is completely
 different from the rest of us, we'd very much like to learn about the
 different factors in your web surfing habits.
 >
 > I did this three weeks ago. In addition the entire company was forced
 for 30 days to see CAPTCHAs any time they visited a site using CloudFlare
 while in our offices. Doing so caused us to fix lots of problems with the
 way the CAPTCHA was implemented. I also personally worked on the code that
 deals with prevention of a CAPTCHA when the circuit changes and fixed a
 bug that was preventing it working correctly.
 >

 You used it for a week after all of these changes were deployed? And you
 didn't encounter any issues? You feel that it works perfectly and that
 there are no valid issues being voiced? Or...?

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361#comment:39>
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