livejournal ban tor-nodes

[Jacob Appelbaum]

James Brown wrote:
> Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
>> James Brown wrote:
>>> The Livejournal has blocked access to that resource through the Tor.
>>> It is certainly the consequence of purshasing the LJ of Russian company
>>> "SUP" by order of Putin and FSB.
>>> That decision of Russian powers of purshacing the LJ was adopted because
>>> many Russian oppositionists used it in the conditions of suffocation of
>>>     freedom of speech by  Putin's bloody fascist regim.
>>> I think that all progressive humanity must require from the US President
>>> B. Obama to order the FBI to investigate the circumstances of purshasing
>>> the LJ by Russian company that was acted obviously as an agent of
>>> Russian secret services against the foundations of the constitutional
>>> order of the USA.
>> Hello,
> 
>> I'm heading over to the LJ offices (in San Francisco) to discuss this
>> ban with them in the next thirty minutes. I'll let you know how it goes
>> and why it happened.
> 
>> Best,
>> Jacob
> 
> 
> Very thanks

Hello again,

In summary:
Mike Perry and I just had a visit to the San Francisco Livejournal
office. The servers at LJ are currently being abused by two users in
Russia. They are currently blocking access to all of the Tor exit nodes
with a rather crufty (but effective) screen scrape of some Tor status
page. They'd like to lift this ban and they'd like to see the abuse
stop. They recognize that many legitimate users are now out in the cold
and they'd like to allow Tor to access LJ.

The service abusing their systems is http://lj2rss.net.ru/; lj2rss
provides a user with an RSS feed of their LJ friends page (normally a
paid service). LJ considers this abuse and has attempted to block this
service. Lj2rss was previously run through basic HTTP proxies. It has
apparently evolved as a service. The lj2rss people decided to ditch HTTP
proxies for the public Tor network. This has caused LJ to filter _all_
access from the Tor network as a quick hack to block their service. LJ
is unhappy with this as they realize this means that many people are not
able to reach LJ. They want to find a solution to this total method of
blocking. They only want to stop lj2rss and not everyone who actually
needs Tor to legitimately use LJ.

We've suggested that rather than outright blocking, users should be
redirected (http 302 rather than 502) to a status page explaining the
outage information. We've also suggested they can have user puzzles or
require a specific login (paid accounts or flagged in some way). As far
as I can tell, this is not a conspiracy by SUP or any other measure
taken on behalf of SUP. The sysadmins at LJ are simply trying to combat
someone abusing their service.

LJ said that they're going to change their status page shortly to
explain the block. They're also working on methods to block the lj2rss
people and not every single user of the Tor network. I hope this is
helpful and that the users of Tor will be able to access LJ services
again shortly.

Best,
Jacob

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