[tor-talk] alt-svc supported by TBB

[Dave Warren]

On 2018-09-18 21:17, TNT BOM BOM wrote:
> thats nice, but doesnt look akward that the company who blocked Tor and
> had that arguements (back then) , went all of a sudden to help Tor? do i
> expect the holy ghost democraciz their brains and get the demon of
> blocking free internet out from them? i dunno but its for sure
> suspecious. but on the same time if they really want to help Tor users
> then thats a good sign. (ofcourse that doesnt mean cloudflare dns safe ,
> nor im supporting to register any website in their services. just saying
> its a good step if they are as they are saying).

I don't really think Cloudflare was ever intentionally actively hostile 
to Tor users, but rather it was an unintended consequence of how they 
attempted to separate legitimate vs malicious traffic. The reality is 
that Tor exits emit both legitimate and malicious traffic, and TBB users 
are (by design) indistinguishable from each other by typical browser 
fingerprinting techniques, so Cloudflare had no obvious way to separate 
malicious vs legitimate requests.

For some time Cloudflare has made it easy for site operators to 
whitelist Tor exits (noting that this means site operators absorb the 
abuse rather than Cloudflare blocking it, and also noting that only a 
tiny fraction of site operations actually do this), they also put effort 
into Privacy Pass (a way to reduce the negative impact without giving up 
privacy).

Could they have done more, better, or sooner? Maybe. But alt-svc wasn't 
supported by TBB until 8.0, and Cloudflare was quick to take advantage 
of it for the benefit of Tor users, that's worth noting.

More importantly though, even if your belief is that Cloudflare was 
previously actively hostile toward Tor, isn't a corporation changing 
their stance a good thing? Isn't a pivot toward being accepting of users 
who want more privacy than usual a good thing for both regular users and 
Tor users?