[tor-talk] Torrentfreak and Cloudflare

[Joe Btfsplk]

On 9/18/2014 6:17 PM, Rick wrote:
> On 09/18/2014 04:48 PM, grarpamp wrote:
>> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Grace H. <grace at mail2tor.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I just visited Cloudflare, pulled some handles and flipped a few switches.
>> For purposes of the Tor wiki, etc.. documenting any available
>> controls for other admins would be useful
> Grace was responding to my original post which you might have missed.
> This was from the site owner's email to me. The
> "handles.......switches." were not to be taken literally.
>>> Confirmed. TF seems to be working just fine right now.
>> What your definition of working and fine are, I don't know.
>> However on a visit to TF just now, I received, and passed, the CF captcha.
> Her definitions are the same as mine. Did you have JS enabled when you
> encountered the captcha? Did you enable it while working through the
> captcha?
Whether captchas provided by any company on any site are working or not 
is one matter.
To many users, the bigger issue (& getting bigger every day) is the 
large number of sites now requiring captchas when using Tor / TBB.

But from my limited testing (for the same sites), I rarely receive 
captchas in Firefox.  I can't remember the last time I got one using 
regular Fx.
All the captchas with TBB could be because the  IPa is often from a 
non-U.S. country - for those that are accessing U.S. sites.
It could be because many Tor IP ranges get blacklisted (temporarily) 
because of spam / unwanted activity.
And some sites may just not like Tor - for various reasons.

One thing is clear to me.  If the trend continues where a significant 
percent of sites require captchas for most Tor users, I'll stop using 
TBB for most browsing, where anonymity isn't absolutely critical.
Unless the captcha process becomes nearly flawless and also does NOT 
require allowing scripts or cookies from Google or the like (known 
trackers).

It will become way too much hassle to deal w/ frequent captchas. Which 
is a shame, because Tor needs more users, doing general browsing to 
increase anonymity from a larger crowd.
One guess why captchas are increasing for TBB is after the Snowden 
documents, the number of TBB users obviously increased.  Many of those 
were good citizens just wanting better privacy & some were people that 
realized TBB was a way to hide their identity for undesirable activity 
(from websites' points of view).  There could be lots of other reasons.