Editing with Tor | Hacker News Reader

Editing with Tor

meta.wikimedia.org

33 pointstshtf18 comments

If you're not familiar with the scale of the vandalism problem on Wikipedia: take whatever your intuitive sense of how much vandalism that one of the most popular sites on the Internet would see if every page on the site included an "edit" button, and then raise it to the power of some positive integer greater than 1.

It's an exaggeration, but only slightly, to say that Wikipedia's core mission is to hold back a giant torrent of vandalism.

The people that just want to change something in an article to 'poop' aren't going to try to use tor to vandalize and the professional vandals would find it too slow (except for making malicious usernames or sleeper accounts) and generally don't have a problem using other proxies or botnet hosts.

I'm sure there is some group of people that would like to do something nefarious on wikipedia that are stopped by blocking tor, but I personally think it would more often be someone wanting to sockpuppet rather than vandalize. A few checkusers always pop up to mention that they see tor as a sewage pipe, but making their job easier does not mean the encyclopedia is better off and they would see a strongly biased sample.

Vandalism, sockpuppetry, two sides of the same 50-sided die.

So much that they have a horde of bots to deal with this stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikipedia_anti-vandal_...

How easy is it to get ahold of a list of Tor exit nodes? In a nightmare scenario, would wikimedia's list of blocked IPs be something an oppressive government might covet?

The list is already public. There are many mirrors of it, for example, this one: http://dannenberg.ccc.de/tor/server/all

Knowing that open proxies have been a source of problems for e.g. IRC and email services, the designers of Tor intentionally made it technically impossible to hide an exit node to help mitigate the potential for abuse.

There are so many things wrong with this comment I do not know where to begin.

"The list is already public" is the understatement of the year. If the list was not public it would be impossible for clients to build a circuit.

"There are many mirrors of it" is the runner up for understatement of the year. Every running instance of tor has the capability to publish the list of exit nodes.

I am not going to pretend to understand anonymous mixes as well as arma, Nick and Paul and I would like to suggest that you do the same. The designers of tor did not make it "technically impossible to hide an exit node to help mitigate the potential for abuse."

It is "technically impossible to hide the exit node list" because without the list clients would not be able to build functioning circuits. But don't take my word for it:

"We can't help but make the information available, since Tor clients need to use it to pick their paths. So if the "blockers" want it, they can get it anyway. Further, even if we didn't tell clients about the list of relays directly, somebody could still make a lot of connections through Tor to a test site and build a list of the addresses they see." [1]

Two of the other sides of tptacek's 50 sided die are censorship resistance and abuse resistance. Anonymity is hard enough as it is. Do everyone a favor and refrain from telling us what arma, nick and paul intended...

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/TorFAQ#You....

Its the entry nodes that the oppressive government would like to block access to. If you can build functioning circuits you can connect to "hidden services" that people have set up with tor. This is how the Silk Road operated.

How do you protect against the oppressive government blocking clients from connecting to the network?

In addition to the entry nodes published by the directory servers Tor nodes can be configured as bridges[1]. Bridges do not show up in the authoritative list of tor nodes. There is no public authoritative list of all the bridges so the oppressive government can not easily prevent clients from connecting to all of the bridges.

[1] https://www.torproject.org/docs/bridges.html.en

remember that tor is more than a transit network (traffic exiting out exit nodes). Tor's real strength is hidden services (.onion stuff). These services do not require you to "leave" the tor network, thus are much harder to track down, censor, or block.

pretty trivial from what I can tell. check.torproject.org has basically that, and I think that is derived from the network directory information itself.

If you are interested in these types of problems the Freenode IRC network had some tricky challenges with tor and user access.

I believe they solved this by forcing users to identify if they want to login through tor, isn't it?

The account needs to have been created through non-tor means (ie, normal SSL). So they can still ban the creator if someone abuses the network.

I think it's a pretty good, practical solution to a very hard problem.

http://www.iq.harvard.edu/blog/sss/archives/2011/07/detectin...

This is also why 4chan blocks all access from Tor nodes. The only people who use 4chan from Tor are people posting CP and/or evading their ban.

And since they block even visitors from Tor I do not ever visit it. I would not go near that site without protecting my identity/privacy.

Odd how it mentions softblocks in the theoretical sense since they have been around for years.

I don't get it. Why is this posted?

Because it's an interesting discussion of how a large site deals with a difficult problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com