[tor-talk] One Less Site Blocking Tor (Browser)

[Drew at FoundingDocuments.org]

>>> Not too long ago I used Tor Browser to visit a website and found I was rejected completely. Not even a captcha. Clicking new circuit many times didn’t help either. 

>>> A day or two later I heard back. It was gracious enough but supposedly the blocking was to protect customers (ahem, me) and themselves “from possible illicit activity.” 
>>> 
>>> After a few days on the back burner, I wrote them back and asked: what was illicit or illegal with me trying to learn their business hours. 


>> Great story! thanks for sharing it here.

> More often than not with smaller www sites, I'd assume it's a
> click-click-click configuration in some www admin interface that blocks
> Tor user access by default.
> 
> Do we have any templated message to send to sites that block Tor IPs?  A
> quick internet search says we don't.

Thank you for the compliments. 

I’ve often spoken against stock answers, so it’s hard for me to comply. I hope the offended will forgive me. 

I think the best advice is based on the existing relationship and current context (generally place & time, reason, etc). 

Fundamentally, businesses want to move product, and every organization, to varying degrees, wants its information available 24/7. 

If they’ve gone to the time & expense to set up a website, perhaps outsourcing the hosting too, they would not be pleased repeat or new customers are being blocked. 

Here’s where the man-in-the-middle problem comes in. Emailing based on addresses or forms on the website is not exactly guaranteed to make it through to the business owners. Especially if the host has a conflict of interest in reselling fear-mongering against tor, whether or not they intended it. 

So as far as what I imagine could be written by me, or something I might feel comfortable using as a resource, I think it would mostly include short sentences or very short paragraphs; some being stand-alone and some being meant for cobbling together. Then a person could use some of it in their email/postal-mail to the owners of the site being blocked. But any message to the site needs to be based on what the site looks like (as I’m sure you know, there are varying degrees of blocking) and the site’s response to the initial contact. Thus some reluctance to write templates. 

I’m not exactly sure how you imagine the flow of (paraphrasing) ~ sending templated messages to sites that block Tor. 

Some one-liners popped in my mind but they sound like strange greeting/sympathy cards: Thank you for your interest in blocking harmful activity, but please understand I was only trying to find out when your store is open so I can come in and buy stuff.  Which I am sure would sound better in haiku. :-)