Rob Church wrote:
Let's stop talking about global blocking/permissions/etc. until single
sign-on is complete. Then we can bolt things onto it. Without
centralised user identification and authentication, we can do absolute
Jack about global blocks.
Preferably let's not. There's all sorts of nice things we can do easily
when we have single signon, but I'm not going to be holding my breath
until it happens.
We're not talking about blocking user accounts globally, which indeed
would depends on single signon. What is being proposed here is a
centralized list of IP addresses of open proxies that Wikimedia projects
can choose to block automatically.
In fact, we effectively already have that ability, in the form of the
SORBS DNSBL code. It's just that it was turned off, since it was using
a third-party list and we found that this didn't work too well. All
we'd have to do to make it work again is set up our own private DNSBL
and an admin interface for it.
Of course, there may be other, even easier ways to do this. I'm just
saying that single signon is only tangentially related to all this.
--
Ilmari Karonen