Hello directly from Jimbo at Wikipedia

[Adam Shostack]

Hi Jim,

Thanks for joining in.  I'm glad to hear that we're on the same side.
I know that I don't have a good understanding of the type of vandalism
you're mentioning, or how often you saw it.  Do you have some samples
you could point me to?  Do you have any numbers (or even feel) for
what fraction of your total vandalism came in via Tor?  Via other open
proxies?  Via hotspots or zombies/RBL'd hosts?  Any numbers on
what proportion of tor users were being vandals?

Adam



On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 01:46:13PM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:
| I'd like to say thanks for the invitation to join this dialogue.
| 
| Let me tell you what I love.  I love the Chinese dissident who wants to
| work on Wikipedia articles in safety.  I love that Wikipedia is an open
| platform that allows people to have that voice, and that we can have a
| positive impact on the world in large part because we don't bow to
| censorship and we are willing to reach out and work with people like Tor
| to empower individuals to speak, no matter what sort of oppressive
| conditions they face.
| 
| WE ARE ON THE SAME SIDE.
| 
| So it always dismays me to see conversations like this, and I think that
| at least some cooler heads here will understand why I get frustrated and
| why I make no apologizes for characterizing at least some people in the
| Tor community as being irresponsible.
| 
| "I share frustrations that the statements attributed to Jimmy Wales in
| the record below and in previous messages seem to show some fundamental
| misunderstandings and willful ignorance of Tor, and more broadly of
| identity, identifiers, reputation, authentication, etc. in open
| network communications"
| 
| Willful ignorance?  Not at all.  What I know is that we are forced to
| block Tor servers regularly due to persistent vandalism.  That's a sad
| fact to me.  It's a difficult thing for those of us who are serious
| about these issues.  But the really sad thing is when elements of the
| Tor community are not willing to face up to this as a legitimate and
| difficult problem.
| 
| "everyone is so worried about it, but has any one ever been successfully
| been able to use tor to effectively spam anyone?"
| 
| Yes, of course!  We deal with it constantly.  We have an effective means
| of dealing with it: we block Tor servers from editing wikipedia.  But is
| that what any of us want?
| 
| "Misbehaviour is in the eye of the observer, however."
| 
| No, actually it isn't.  There is such a thing as objectively
| identifiable malicious behavior.  We aren't Chinese censors here.  We're
| the good guys.  We want to work with you.
| 
| Yes, we could implement tight security to only allow people who identify
| themselves (perhaps we'll require a credit card number, someone
| suggests?)... but *cough*, aren't we supposed to care about privacy here?
| 
| --Jimbo