[tor-talk] still unable to reach StartPage or Ixquick

[Joe Btfsplk]

On 10/9/2013 8:00 PM, krishna e bera wrote:
> On 13-10-09 07:14 PM, Joe Btfsplk wrote:
>> After manually adding prefs.js entries in 3.0a4, that were suggested on
>> Tor project Trac to make it work, there's no change in being unable to
>> connect to Startpage, Ixquick, DDG; often even Wikipedia -SSL & Google.
>>
>> Could it be (for Startpage & Ixquick), they've suddenly become very
>> popular, due to lots of recent news about various "people" watching
>> everything?  Maybe they're limiting Tor or other anonymous traffic to
>> keep servers open for regular users.
>>
>> No explanation for DDG, Wikipedia.  Just that in regular Fx, can connect
>> to all of them instantly.
>
> When you reinstalled or upgraded your TBB, did you remove the directory
> first?  Sometimes a clean install gets rid of strange glitches leftover
> from in place upgrades.
>
I never install TBB over the top of old versions or use an old profile.

Since it's done the same thing (starting > a wk ago in 2.3.25-12), now 
same exact thing in 2.3.25-13 & 3.0a4.
I can connect to Bing & Yahoo - in any TBB version I'm now trying.

I even have tabs open w/ the URLs already entered for Startpage, 
Ixquick, Google & say Bing, Yahoo AND any usual site. Google doesn't 
fail as much, but never had a problem w/ any of them before.
So when Startpage, et al. fail, I instantly load another site 
(Mozilla.org, etc.) - which succeeds - using the same relay circuit.  I 
checked w/ the network map open to make sure circuits weren't changing 
between the failures & successes.

One or 2x wouldn't mean anything, but I've repeated it dozens of times 
over many days w/ very consistent results.
I also have Firefox open w/ the same site as TBB - say Startpage. When 
they fail in TBB, I instantly load it in regular Fx & loads every time.  
So the search sites' servers aren't overloaded - at least for normal 
internet traffic.

For a bit, I wondered if my ISP was slowing connections to Tor relays, 
but I don't  have the TBB connection problem w/ most other sites, so 
that can't be it.  I'm just brain storming.
Thinking outside the box - what if I look at the problem from opposite 
direction.  Instead of thinking as a problem of "Startpage, et al. not 
accepting Tor / TBB," look at it from a "Tor / TBB having problems with 
these sites" stance (Startpage, et al.).

There's obviously SOME reason, but not typical - given all the methods & 
versions I've used to rule out possibilities.  Yahoo, Bing, Amazon, Ebay 
searches - together w/ the nsa, *must* be blocking me from other 
searches engines, forcing me to use them. Yeah, that must be it.