Google cache blocking non-exit relays?

[Richard Johnson]

At 14:41 -0400 on 2010-04-26, downie - wrote:
> Hi,
> has anyone else running a non-exit relay had trouble accessing Google's
> cache today? I have a 'your network is making automated queries' block -
> curiously only when clicking through from google.com, not from google.de
> or google.fr .
> GD

I've seen this twice within the last year when searching Google from a
browser on a system running a middleman relay.

FWIW, the two instances correlated loosely in time (within days) with
external warnings.  The first was a "helpful" notice from one of those
somewhat shady security scan companies intended to sell their external
scanning services by giving us an alarming warning about a tor node
existing on our network.

Shortly after (modulo the standard agency "slow glass" delay), we were
contacted by a law enforcement agency about the tor node.  We asked them to
de-prioritize whatever source of information led them to send the warning,
as the source was clearly noisy/bad (the relay was a long-time node, not a
new instance, and the relay's exit policy was middleman only).  They
understandably did not answer queries about their source.

Contacts at Google have not been able to (or allowed to) shed any light on
where they're getting the false details about "automated queries", though
my suspicion is naive and incorrect use of tor node lists.  Sadly for them,
their captcha for searching anyway from such a system is also broken, so we
just switch to Bing.


Richard