[tor-talk] Pissed off about Blacklists, and what to do?

[Matthew Finkel]

On Thu, Feb 06, 2014 at 10:46:32PM -0500, grarpamp wrote:
> So many sites that we all use are now blacklisting Tor. It's unclear
> whether it is via their use of tools that blindly utilize blacklists,
> or if they are making a conscious choice to deny Tor users. As far
> as I'm concerned, we are all legitimate users of their services and
> quite frankly, I've had enough... exactly the same as I'm sure you
> have all had.
> 

Contacting Project Honey Pot has been on my TODO list for a while now
with the hope that some progress can be made, such as they handle exit
nodes specially. The anti-spam list ecosystem is much larger than
Project Honey Pot, but it would be a start.

> What can we do, as a collective social entity, to put an end to
> this madness? It is not as if we, as Tor users, present any more
> of a load upon their help/fraud/abuse desks than the wider open
> internet as a whole, even when if perhaps adjusted for market share
> of source IP's. So what can we do?
> 

Paul's mail was very much on point with this. However, Tor has a
perception/PR problem for this. ipset[0] is a prime example of this.
Regarding its listing of numerous blacklists and explicitly the list of
Tor exit nodes it says "...it certainly reduces comment spam on a
WordPress blog and there have been claims from websites owners that
their servers had been attacked through Tor."

[0]
http://trick77.com/2013/10/12/using-ipset-to-ban-bad-ip-addresses-from-project-honey-pot-spamhaus-tor-openbl-and-more/

> This is in re: Hulu (whis is presumably authenticated)... but really,
> it applies to any service which we, the legitimate users of Tor,
> are denied access to.
> 
> It has simply gone too far and we should be putting effort into
> reversing this trend by interacting with these deniers to become
> permitters.
> 
> What do we do?

Basically what Lunar said.

A more active and vocal community may help. Passively accepting the
current situation doesn't seem to be working. If the services don't
know that legitimate Tor users exist in a significant quantity and
that they are worthwhile to support, then there's no incentive to try.

- Matt