Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucb1e | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile they censor anyone running Tor internal relays on the same IP by g-line banning them.

Tor allows for rampant abuse and is problematic to prevent. Many IRC networks ban it due to this.

However, the solution is to make it so if you want to use Tor on an existing that you instead connect via a hidden service address, allowing the IRCd to mark you as a Tor user and then allow channels to stem abuse.

I said an internal Tor relay, not an exit node. My IP cannot be abused for irc spam. These Quakenet guys are just against tor.

I am also on some blacklist, and while I can still connect to most channels, some don't work anymore. Because of this blacklist I cannot join #help, which is the channel I must connect to if I want to ask them anything, such as which blacklist I'm on. Finally I got a friend of mine to ask them for me and a #help operator /queried me (private chat), but they won't disclose which blacklists they use. Meanwhile I haven't been able to find any, and if I'm on something, I wouldn't know what for.

So that's my experience with Quakenet, censorship and non-disclosure of blacklists. Then they publish this and reach #1 on Hackernews? Come on. Bullshit. They don't give a flying fuck about freedom of speech.

irc.perl.org doesn't disclose its BOPM config either.

This is because when we're getting attacked we want to force the attackers to go to the trouble of trying to connect, rather than being able to filter their set of available client nodes to the ones not blacklisted before attempting to connect. Makes attacks more obvious and makes attackers work harder.

Free, volunteer run services sometimes have to make decisions that prioritise being able to deal with problems within the available resources over the well being of the occasional individual user who ends up being caught as a false positive.

After all, if the network just got taken down entirely, it can't transmit any speech at all.

we actually don't, the only thing tor specific we do is set to their host to something along the lines of 11223344.tor.gateway.quakenet.org.

OTOH a lot of people do naughty things through tor (e.g. mass flooding) and get caught automatically by the network services, resulting in a large %age of tor hosts being banned for short periods.

yeah, I just tried to connect using irssi from my non-exit relay, works just fine...

Odd, my experience differs.

As pointed out by blibble, the blocking is almost certainly due to Mr. Angry having got himself onto a list of open proxies somewhere along the line; any effort directed at tor, whether masking, restricting, or outright blocking, is in my experience always aimed at exit nodes only - because there's simply nothing to be gained by blocking relays.

Note that I have no particular insight into this specific case, but have opered on irc.perl.org for some years now (and was freenode staff for a while) and am working based on a >95% correlation with previous similar cases that I've dealt with myself.

> we actually don't, the only thing tor specific we do is set to their host to something along the lines of 11223344.tor.gateway.quakenet.org.

Then explain to me why my client was reporting disconnects for months after the week I hosted that relay? I was unable to connect to any Quakenet server.

Also I'm not a Tor gateway if I'm running an internal Tor relay. There is no need to change my hostname.

And can you also tell me which blacklists you check user's IPs against? As I've commented elsewhere, I was on some sort of blacklist that prevented me from entering #help, but someone from #help (that a friend of mine talked to) said it could not be disclosed which blacklist that was. Note that this happened before any Tor relay activities.

ah, sorry didn't notice the relay bit.

we don't do anything explicitly to relays.

we get the tor ips from tor itself, and filter out hosts that have a connection policy that would result in them not being able to connect.

we do however source and combine multiple proxy lists, which I suspect you ended up on.

I seem to remember you were chatting to me, and I said something along the lines of 'try again tomorrow and if it's still broken I'll sort it out manually', and you didn't come back!

I'm not sure how many people get this, but I think you might be confusing me with someone else. The blacklist thing was like a year or two ago. I don't remember all the details ;)

Thanks for replying to this anyway.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com