I share Risker’s concerns here and limiting the anonymity
set to the intersection of Tor users and established wiki
contributors seems problematic. Also, the bootstrapping
issue needs working out and relegating Tor users to second
class citizens that need to edit through a proxy seems less
than ideal (though the specifics of that are unclear to me).
But, at a minimum, this seems like a useful exercise to
run if only for the experimental results and to show good faith.
I’m more than willing to help out. Please get in touch.
Arlo
On Wednesday, March 11, 2015 at 9:10 AM, Chris Steipp wrote:
On Mar 11, 2015 2:23 AM, "Gergo Tisza"
<gtisza(a)wikimedia.org (mailto:gtisza@wikimedia.org)> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 10, 2015 at 5:40 PM, Chris Steipp <csteipp(a)wikimedia.org
(mailto:csteipp@wikimedia.org)>
wrote:
> I'm actually envisioning that the user would edit through the third
party's
proxy
(via OAuth, linked to the new, "Special Account"), so no special
permissions are needed by the "Special Account", and a standard block on
that username can prevent them from editing. Additionally, revoking the
OAuth token of the proxy itself would stop all editing by this process,
so
there's a quick way to "pull the plug" if it looks like the edits are
predominantly unproductive.
I'm probably missing the point here but how is this better than a plain
edit proxy, available as a Tor hidden service, which a 3rd party can set
up
at any time without the need to coordinate with
us (apart from getting an
OAuth key)? Since the user connects to them via Tor, they would not learn
any private information; they could be authorized to edit via normal OAuth
web flow (that is not blocked from a Tor IP); the edit would seemingly
come
from the IP address of the proxy so it would not
be subject to Tor
blocking.
Setting up a proxy like this is definitely an option I've considered. As I
did, I couldn't think of a good way to limit the types of accounts that
used it, or come up with an acceptable collateral I could keep from the
user, that would prevent enough spammers to keep it from being blocked
while being open to people who needed it. The blinded token approach lets
the proxy rely on a trusted assertion about the identity, by the people who
it will impact if they get it wrong. That seemed like a good thing to me.
However, we could substitute the entire blinding process with a public page
that the proxy posts to that says, "this user wants to use tor to edit,
vote yes or no and we'll allow them based on your opinion". And the proxy
only allows tor editing by users with a passing vote.
That might be more palatable for enwiki's socking policy, with the risk
that if the user's IP has ever been revealed before (even if they went
through the effort of getting it deleted), there is still data to link them
to their real identity. The blinding breaks that correlation. But maybe a
more likely first step to actually getting tor edits?
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