[tor-talk] Craigslist now blocking all Tor IPs? Template for anyone:

[Dave Warren]

On 2015-01-20 15:21, Seth wrote:
> On Tue, 20 Jan 2015 13:15:43 -0800, Greg Norcie <gnorcie at umail.iu.edu> 
> wrote:
>
>> I (and a few other friends) have noticed Padmapper's results seem 
>> less complete than usual lately.
>>
>> Coincidence?
>
> I would think than an organization like Padmapper would have the 
> technical and financial wherewithal to build out their own network of 
> scraper nodes apart from the tor network.
>
> This would be almost impossible to block especially if they stood up 
> the infrastructure on a large cloud providers where instances could be 
> re-provisioned with new IP address in numerous cities all over the 
> globe in a matter of minutes with a click of the button.
>

I'm not so sure that that would work particularly well, humans rarely 
live in datacenters, and it's tough to make cloud IPs look and act the 
same as residential IPs, especially when other IPs in the same /24 (or 
larger) are owned by different customers. User behaviour would also be 
quite different, and it would probably be difficult to mimic typical 
human patterns of usage while scraping enough information to be 
worthwhile before Craigslist pulls the plug.

Tor exit nodes, on the other hand, have a lot of human shields using 
them too, so it makes it a lot harder to narrow down a specific "bad 
actor" without also hitting actual users.

So while Tor isn't necessary an ideal choice here, it has some 
advantages over dynamically allocating and dropping cloud IPs.


> I'm curious why Craigslist doesn't just sell their listing data via 
> API access to companies like Padmapper, that would be a win-win.

Because they're actively hostile to creating a better user experience. 
Don't get me wrong, the fact that their website doesn't look like 
someone from marketing took a dump all over it is part of what is 
awesome about it, but still...

-- 
Dave Warren
http://www.hireahit.com/
http://ca.linkedin.com/in/davejwarren