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

[Tor Bug Tracker & Wiki]

#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 cypherpunks):

 Replying to [comment:105 sjmurdoch]:
 > We have done a survey of this problem and the results are published in
 the paper
 [https://sec.cs.ucl.ac.uk/users/smurdoch/papers/ndss16doyousee.pdf '"Do
 You See What I See? Differential Treatment of Anonymous Users"'] (see also
 the [https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2016/02/23/do-you-see-what-i-see/
 accompanying blog post]). Our results show that Cloudflare blocks around
 10–50% of Tor nodes and is one of the major reasons that Tor users are
 unable to access websites from the Alexa top-1000 list (though it was
 worse before June 2015).

 Obviously you are not a Tor user, otherwise you would have immediately
 realised the manifest falsehood of your assertion.

 Your data is already outdated, your conclusions, at least in this topic,
 stale. Maybe 10-50% was a reasonable estimate when you did your data
 acquisition, not anymore.

 Since around Dec. 2015 Cloudflare almost certainly blocks **all** exit
 nodes. If on some exceedingly rare occasion we aren't blocked is because
 (a) the Tor network, and its consensus, is dynamic and cloudflare
 obviously doesn't do live probing, it probably keeps a cached blacklist
 that only updates every few weeks or so; (b) something that some
 cypherpunks and people who actually have bothered to set up nodes know.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/18361#comment:107>
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