New ban of tor-exit-nodes -IPs by the LiveJournal

[Flamsmark]

On 7 March 2010 11:31, James Brown <jbrownfirst at gmail.com> wrote:

> Many IP-addresses of exit-nodes of the Tor was banned from access to the
> LJ today.
> We have the next information when trying to connect with it:
> "You've been temporarily banned from accessing LiveJournal, perhaps
> because you were hitting the site too quickly. Please make sure that
> you're following our Bot Policy <http://www.livejournal.com/bots/>. If
> you have questions, contact us at webmaster at livejournal.com with the
> following information: CMTGP7urjSahlts @ xx.xx.xx.xx
>
> I think that it is a new, latent method to restrict access to the LJ
> through the Tor which certainly established by order of Putin's and
> Medvedev's junta gived to the "SUP".


I'm not sure about your conspiracy theory; it sounds like they've just
implemented a new bot policy. If they really wanted to ban Tor, they could
just ban all the exits. This policy does have a negative impact on those
attempting to access LJ through Tor. However, it sounds like a neutral rule
of general applicability: banning bots which violate your bot rules is not
an unreasonable thing to do. It certainly doesn't seem that they're
deliberately trying to go after Tor users in an attempt to prevent them from
connecting.

In the past, when LJ has implemented measures that had negative knock-on
effects on Tor, they've responded pretty positively to inquiries from the
Tor developers/community. It's been my impression that they're pretty
sympathetic to the anonymity needs of their users, and willing to compromise
in order to meet those needs. Perhaps a fluent English-speaker could write
them a polite note pointing out that this new measure (if indeed it is new)
has had this unforeseen negative secondary effect, and requesting their
cooperation in mitigating it.
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