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Comment by themartorana | Hacker News Reader

  * facepalm *

No room for nuance, huh? Or appreciation for the position CloudFlare is in and their obligation to their clients?

How would you solve this? Abuse from Tor IPs is a known and documented problem. If you have a solution, I'll bet CloudFlare has a job opening.

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If CloudFlare keeps blocking Tor, the blocks will be circumvented. Unfortunately, it's the assholes who will figure that out first. But so it goes in war.

If CloudFlare would at least let their client decide by themselves, that would be an awesome start. Even if it's enabled by default.

They do this already. See their blog post. You can explicitly whitelist Tor IPs, I thought it was plan limited to only enterprise, but it seems it's available to all actually.

It's a fundamental problem with IP-based reputation. Same goes for VPNs where there isn't a specific list of hosts you can whitelist.

IP based reputation has served us well, but it's no longer relevant. IPv4 has reached exhaustion, carrier-grade NAT is being deployed and the idea that an IP address correlates with one person or a very small group of people no longer holds. You can sort of pretend it does if you only serve america and europe, but that will change too.

Any company that currently bases their offering on IP-based reputation better be working on different solutions to the problem or they're not going to stay relevant for long. This is an existential issue for CDNs.

Absolutely not. I believe in privacy and have zero tolerance for big businesses who throw their weight around at the expense of minority communities (Tor users in this case). I understand CloudFlare's need to make a profit. That is why we need to turn treating Tor traffic like normal traffic into a good business decision.

I think you underestimate how much of the traffic from Tor that is malicious.

I have barely ever seen any legitimate Tor traffic, it has all been spam bots or other kinds of traffic I would rather avoid.

Why so much hate against CloudFlare? What's the big deal about being a "company" if you can see the CEO replying to you right here, right now?

On top of that CloudFlare as a free service helped lots of small controversial, hated-by-some-government websites to stay alive. They protect >ANYONE< that is being DDoS-ed usually for free.

If keeping freedom of speech ( as in "being online" ) for all those users they protect, for you is "at the expense of minority", I think you are totally biased.

You misunderstand the problem. The issue is that CloudFlare is treating Tor traffic like any other traffic. What you want is special treatment for Tor above and beyond the whitelisting feature CloudFlare already offers to site owners.

> CloudFlare is treating Tor traffic like any other traffic

I don't see this in any practical fashion. I can visit a CloudFlare hosted site from the regular internet for hours (even scrape automatically) with no problems; the first time I hit the same site through Tor, it gets a double or triple capchca.

Perhaps it should be a blacklist instead of a whitelist. Defaults matter.

Of course you can visit it for hours, because you are most likely one of very few people who are accessing the CloudFlare netrwork from that IP. If you were to go through a public VPN, then the chance of captcha will also go up. The issue is that with higher traffic out of a single IP, there is a much higher likelihood of malicious activity.

A blacklist would do nothing to solve this, since the fundamental problem is the way Tor and VPNs work, by aggregating traffic into exit nodes at specific IPs.

Edit: And upon further thought, it most likely is a blacklist. A bunch of malicious requests go out from one IP, so that IP is blocked. Because it's an exit node, it also blocks a bunch of other legitimate people.

> A blacklist would do nothing to solve this

I mean blacklist "Tor" to give them capchcas, instead of having to whitelist them to not give them capchcas.

> I don't see this in any practical fashion.

You don't?

> I can visit a CloudFlare hosted site from the regular internet for hours (even scrape automatically) with no problems

Ah but this is not the same. Try doing so from an IP which is also sending malicious traffic, and you will see the same issue.

Technically, no, it's not the same thing. But, for a user, it is the same thing. Ultimately, it's the user's experience that matters, not the technical details.

Much like I don't care which bus gets me from point A to point B, or if I'm the only the one on the bus or not... it's the experience of the trip between points that matters.

If you don't care which bus gets you from point A to point B, then stay off of the bus that all of the malicious packets are riding...

Eh. No thanks. "Default deny" is the only sane security default.

"Absolutely not. I believe in privacy and have zero tolerance for big businesses who throw their weight around at the expense of minority communities (Tor users in this case)."

You're fine with the anonymity industry throwing their weight around at the expense of a handful of CDN's, though. I understand Tor's need to protect users. That's why they need to find a way to treat malicious traffic different than normal traffic. Then adopting them might be a good business decision.

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