[tor-talk] CloudFlare

[Matthew Finkel]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 01:45:12PM -0700, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 1:01 PM, Matthew Finkel
> <matthew.finkel at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Wikimedia is actually willing to discuss an alternative setup if a
> > usable one is found. Their current implementation is not really
> > acceptable, but there also isn't really a working/implemented alternative
> > solution, at this point (and it's not exactly at the top of their list
> > to implement their own).
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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— but they need to be implemented and
> not have a high deployment or operating cost.
> 

Yeah, the various ideas for nym systems was what I was implying and the
"limited resource" aspect of them is definitely hard to specify.

> There are some people who hold the position that instant doubling of
> identities (w/ and w/o tor) that attackers would get is not acceptable
> but with things like
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2013-04-08/News_and_notes
>  and Tor's effectiveness at evading censorship I expect that most can
> be convinced that it's worth it.  Harder would be the fact that
> English Wikipedia (and many other larger Wikipedias) blocks most data
> centers and VPS services with large rangeblocks as they get used as
> account multipliers by socks and an obvious nym implementation would
> partially defeat that.

And I think given the current situation this is an understandable
action, however it should not be necessary and sadly this is most detrimental
to the users who rely on Tor to reach the uncensored internet.

- Matt