[tor-relays] collecting info on Wikipedia blocking non-exits

[0x010C]

Hi,

Besides being a relay operator, I'm a sysop on the French Wikipedia.

On all the Wikimedia projects, we have several blocking options. Tor relays are concerned by two of them:
* IPs of the exit nodes are automatically blocked based on the public list, see the 'TorBlock' Mediawiki Extension [1].
* When sysops found that vandalisms are coming from IPs bellowing to a hosting company (that are not likely to be legitimate connexions), it very often means that there are some open proxys so we manually "soft-block" (or block when needed) the complete IP range, see [2]. As a side effect, relays are often located on this kind of IP ranges, that's why guard and middle nodes are also often blocked.

"Soft-blocks" can be simply bypassed using an registered account, while to bypass a full block (to edit while using tor for example) it is needed to ask for an "IP block exempt flag", see [3] and [4].

— 0x010C


[1] <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TorBlock>
[2] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/No_open_proxies>
[3] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/IP_block_exempt>
[4] <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Steward_requests/Global_permissions#Requests_for_global_IP_block_exemption>


5 janvier 2018 14:12 "Martin Møller Skarbiniks Pedersen" <traxplayer at gmail.com> a écrit:

> On 5 January 2018 at 10:05, Andreas Krey <a.krey at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 02 Jan 2018 15:13:16 +0000, Alison Macrina wrote:
>>> Hi friends,
>>> 
>>> I'd like to collect some anecdata about this issue regarding Wikipedia
>>> blocking edits from Tor non-exit relays:
>>> https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/24758
> 
> And they are blocking digitalocean /16 block
> 
> Your
> current IP address is 45.55.xxx.yyy, and the blocked range is
> 45.55.0.0/16. Please include all above details in any queries you make.
> You are currently unable to edit Wikipedia.
> You are still able to view pages, but you are not currently able to
> edit, move, or create them.
> Editing from 45.55.0.0/16 has been blocked (disabled) by
> Materialscientist for the following
> reason(s):
> The IP address that you are currently using has been blocked because it is
> believed to be a web host provider. To prevent abuse, web hosts may be
> blocked from editing Wikipedia.
> You will not be able to edit Wikipedia using a web host provider.
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