[tor-talk] CloudFlare

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Thu Apr 18 21:51:57 UTC 2013


> It's the same old story:  There are persistent highly annoying trouble
> makers— not even many of them— who are effectively deterred by
> blocking whatever proxies they use. Eventually they hit tor, and thus
> tor must be blocked from editing.  This abuse isn't imaginary.

Of course it isn't imaginary. However this is where kneejerkers are
just being dumb... 2^8 exits will *never* ever be anything in comparison
to the 2^30 IP's reasonably estimated to be actually in use. Ten
square kilo's of your favorite big city has more abusable open IP's
than 2^8. Know how many big cities there are? Know how many
laptops and wifi and open wallplates there are? Lots.

Though sure, I do suggest and accept that Tor may present a
different *class* of abuse than other categories of abusable
IP's.

> not have a high deployment or operating cost

I think cost is large what they think about. Just a...  'Really? You mean we
can turn a flag and whack 2^8 at zero cost, sweet, we just eliminated a
help desk drone's worth of salary from our costs'. That's pretty cold.

> The various magical nymtoken ideas would probably be acceptable— they
> just need to make it so that an unbounded supply of identities is not
> any cheaper than it already is

Nyms wouldn't be usable by legitimate anons unless they are
free from linkable properties. Whether it's usage and cookies across
sites, or back to the anon themself. Even then you must trust the third
party nym provider with the nym logs. History proves that trust is always
misplaced and broken.

On the other hand, a little development cost by a site can put up some
pretty big walls against abuse in the form of time delayed accounts,
captchas now and then, good filters on your i/o, etc. And often cost
less than whatever service you pay to keep you 'safe'.

And honestly, if you're so fucking tight that you can't pony up for
a proper abuse desk, then both your business model and you
should expect failure.

The only thing that can truly and properly solve a human problem
is humans, not robots. That is a lot of what Tor is all about, solving
problems. Those who would blindly swat Tor down are part of the
problem.


More information about the tor-talk mailing list