Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Planning to tighten TorBlock settings

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 11:28 AM, 7v5w7go9ub0o <7v5w7go9ub0o at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thank you for bringing this up!         How sad for us all!
>
> I sure hope that the Tor community can quickly effect some sort of short
> term solution. The precedent of destination sites restricting
> Tor access - even temporarily - is something that must be avoided
> (before governments become involved). Even if we have to use a blunt
> instrument (e.g. temporarily blocking wikipedia access entirely).

Wikipedia's problems with TOR are purely practical ones… when editing
is enabled via TOR a few bad people will cause major problems from
time to time and Wikipedia has no means to inhibit this abuse short of
blocking write access from Tor entirely.

This is generally regarded as very unfortunate by many people involved
with Wikipedia and by people in the Wikimedia foundation itself…  as
this project is full of people who care deeply about free speech.
(Heck, they hired Mike Godwin as their general council)

There are some Wikipedia users whos views on Tor are not rational,
they don't recognize that a significant part (but not all!) of the bad
activity that comes from Tor just comes from other channels when tor
is blocked, or they attribute tor-unrelated trouble makers to Tor…
But I don't think these people are a majority. More involvement from
the tor using community in Wikipedia may help that.

To solve this issue I believe that TOR needs a strong pseudo-anonymous
system built in and available to users.  Something where Wikipedia can
block a single misbehaving user just as easily as they can without Tor
and that user can't simply mint 100 more accounts in a few minutes.
There have been various proposals for systems to accomplish this in
the past, but unless one is integrated and easily supported by
websites it will do no good.

I do not believe that any lesser measure will be sufficient.  If you
blocked access entirely it would simply be pointed out that the reason
for the write blocking is justified by practical concerns and that the
read denial is not under Wikipedia's control…  Many many other
websites wouldn't care if read access were blocked at all.