[tor-talk] Yelp blocking Tor users from viewing entire site

[Öyvind Saether]

> One other thing they try to protect from is people writing reviews
> for their own businesses. If someone logs into Yelp as the business
> owner and as a reviewer from the same IP, they would make such review
> "not recommended" (previously they made it "hidden" and protected
> with captcha). And possibly flag the whole business as suspect for

This is clearly not why they are blocking Tor. Yelp has decided that
you can't read their website anonymously. If they were blocking http(s)
POST requests then that would be another story. As someone who has a
bunch of websites myself I do have some understanding as to why someone
would block http(s) POST but simply denying people access to read your
website anonymously is going way further.

> writing false reviews. Yelp also sends businesses monthly reports on
> how many people viewed their Yelp listings and from which geographic
> areas. Tor defeats such detection schemes, therefore they decided to
> block it to simplify their guessing and reporting work.

This could be a reason but if they can not locate where the websites
visitor is coming from then they could simply not count it.

Regardless of why, I've put *.yelp.com/.* in the blacklist for the YaCy
P2P clearnet search node at http://q3kuvvtxvhzagc5p.onion/ so I won't
be clicking any links there by accident anyway. (on that topic, if
someone has a big list of every site out there which uses Cloudflare to
DOS attack all visitors coming from Tor then feel free to send it my
way).
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 181 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/attachments/20150127/f9bd4149/attachment.sig>