livejournal ban tor-nodes

[Kyle Williams]

Jacob Appelbaum wrote:
> 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
>
>   
Thank you for checking this out and getting the facts back to the 
community so quickly.

- K
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