On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Jasper Deng
<jasper(a)jasperswebsite.com> wrote:
This question is analogous to the question of
open proxies. The answer has
universally been that the costs (abuse) are just too high.
No, it's not analogous to just permitting open proxies as no one in
this thread is suggesting just flipping it on.
I proposed issuing blind exemption tokens up-thread as an example
mechanism which would preserve the rate limiting of abusive use
without removing privacy.
However, we might consider doing what the
freenode IRC network does.
Freenode requires SASL authentication to connect on Tor, which basically
means only users with registered accounts can use it. The main reason for
hardblocking and not allowing registered accounts on-wiki via Tor is that
CheckUsers need useful IP data. But it might be feasible if we just force
all account creation to happen on "real" IPs, although that still hides
some data from CheckUsers.
What freenode does is not functionally useful for Tor users. In my
first hand experience it manages to enable abusive activity while
simultaneously eliminating Tor's usefulness at protecting its users.
The only value it provides is providing a pretext of "tor support"
without actually doing something good... and we already have the "you
can get an IPblock-exempt (except you can't really, and if you do
it'll get randomly revoked." if all we want is a pretext. :)
The "register at real IP, then only use TOR through an account" flow implies
trust in some entity (such as freenode irc network opers or Wikipedia CheckUsers). I
currently believe that requiring such trust doesn't "eliminate TOR's
usefullness at protecting its users".
Gryllida