Open Proxy Monitors

[Nick Mathewson]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 12:56:16PM -0700, Hee So wrote:
> On some IRC channels, being anonymous via an open proxy will
> cause "you" to get banned.  Since Tor is in large part a
> SOCKS proxy, I could envision someone to extend the existing
> open proxy monitors to search for ORs (or more simply download
> the list of routers from the directory server) and ban those.
> 
> Once that happens, does this mean Tor will no longer be useable
> to IRC? and more generally, to any other target that bans the
> use of open proxies?  I don't see anything in the design that
> would prevent this from happening.

This is correct.  It is not a design goal for Tor to hide which
connections are coming from the Tor network.  Although I *personally*
believe that people should allow anonymous connections, I also believe
that people should have the right to ban anonymous connections to
their own servers if they don't want to get them.

Honestly, the solution for people who want to chat anonymously is to
use a service that doesn't do IP-based authentication and blocking.
Somebody mentioned silc; I haven't tried it myself, or investigated
its security, but it seems a step in the right direction.

Yrs,
-- 
Nick Mathewson
(PGP key changed on 15Aug2004; see http://wangafu.net/key.txt)
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