Why block Tor even for browsing?
I normally use Tor for my browsing. I noticed I am unable to even read the Trisquel forum while on Tor. Why is that? Not all users are bad. It's not that different from a proxy or VPN.
More information here: http://www.torproject.org/about/overview.html.en
Anyway, thank you for using HTTPS. Most tech forums don't even bother with that.
Cheers!
Read this
https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisquelinfo-trying-block-tor-users
I agree however, there is no reason for Tor to be whitelisted or blacklisted. I am forced to keep this old version just to come here. -.-
Never crossed my mind such an issue would be already reported. Glad to meet another Tor user!
Nice to meet you too. I am happy to see other people here using Tor as their "main" browser. It's a very important thing to protect ourselves (I know that from personal experience :S).
If you don't mind me asking, which OS do you run, and what other privacy/security tools do you use?
I am running Debian right now, and enjoying it very much, I usually pay some attention to firewall rules, and have been looking into rootkits lately.
As for the blocking thing, we will have to wait. Andrew already did what was necessary. Given the fact that Tor is free software, and protects people online, there is no reason for us to be blocked. :)
I don't think it should be blocked even if it was nonfree software. It would just be like trisquel.info blocking Internet Explorer because it's proprietary.
I run Tor on a few flavors of Win7, also Win XP and a couple of GNU/Linux distributions, including Tails. Even Tor I use in all its three states: alpha, beta and stable. To make things worse, some run with all scripts disabled, a few have extensions added.
The firewall should block (reject) outside access, than you open ports as needed. Care should be taken to avoid some spoofs that might resemble coming from the LAN. That's about all.
The fact that one app is free software or not is irrelevant in this case. It's more about mentality. Everybody wants to be a guard in the Panopticon, even if the guards are watched in their own small Panopticon. There's so much to read about these concepts so I don't expect whomever is running one site or another to act different than told on TV.
Everybody *should* have read only access to the entire site. Beyond that is up to the admins to find a model that fits them best.
I've posted a bug report here:
https://trisquel.info/en/issues/10780
Andrew.
Thank you andrew. That's the best way to handle it.
Again, thank you Andrew for the bug report. Being for the first time I had no idea Tor was Ok before. Now it's fixed.
Cheers!
I am a member!
Why is there a need for whitelisting user agent strings anyway? The user agent string is easily changed, and malicious clients will just spoof a legitimate one anyway.
I'd bet the reason is fighting spammers.
Read only access doesn't fight spam?
It's easy to deny (read AND write) or allow (read AND write) but would mean tinkering to allow read while denying write.
I'm sure patches are accepted though.
It's actually easy, you just have to block the access to the "login" page. That allow "read" access while denying "write" access.
Again, I don't think that is a good idea. There are no spammers here using Tor flooding the forum with BS. So, why block people who like me need to use Tor? Why should we be of any less importance to this community?
Just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should.
I am a member!
The user agent string is easily spoofed. I imagine spammers (who are using bots nowadays) would be spoofing legitimate browsers anyway.
Some certainly would, some however won't. And I would bet a large majority of those who do, will use a windoze UA.
Usually Tor users face some "prejudice" on the internet... Some evil doers use Tor, so Tor get's blocked at a lot of places. Problem is, the real evil doers will use other ways to do so, while the good honest people using Tor for their protection will lose access to content because of that.
When I get a block because of being a Tor user in some website, I usually either try using startpage proxy, or just give up on the website altogether. Some websites made the conscious decision to block Tor and if that's so, I just think they are not worth my time reading/writing/participating/cooperating/etc on their work. Since apparently trisquel will allow the new user agent soon, I think it deserves at least that (for a little amount of time) I keep using the old one to have access to the website. If they persist, maybe I will stop participating.
Sorry, but you seem to have a prejudice. I don't know a site for which the administrators have made a conscious decision to block Tor. Take Wikipedia for example. They block any open proxy they find out. That is their policy. And, as both code and text are free, anybody is free to make an editable mirror. If the end result is good, both text and policy can merge. Non free sites do it for the same reasons, only they can't be replicated. But from what I can figgure out from the top of my head, there are more sites posing as free that block Tor than commercial ventures.
Tor is making, at least in theory, every user look the same. So there are no good guys and bad guys. There is one omnipresent TOR USER. One Tor user, ten thousand Tor users? What is the difference? It's something to be expected. As Arma and the rest of the team puts it: it's very inefficient to run an atack through Tor.
The administrators are not prejudiced. They learnt, some learnt the hard way, the simple tools of the trade. Going from simple to advanced means a few years of hard work and some philosophy books read slowly. Hardly something for most people. So, as one billion people usually leave huge tracks, why not go the easy way?
So you can either take upon yourself to educate the administators. Or just avoid that service altogether. Thanks to free software there is usually not one, but many alternatives to existing services.
There are some websites that block SPECIFICALLY Tor. I don't remember exactly which ones but I think I heard about that on a Tor speech by Roger and Jacob. Also, I have experienced trying to use Tor on a website and being blocked, and using a proxy on the internet (like hidemyass and others) and being able to use it. So, Tor is the most blocked privacy software around the world yes.
I know it seems that I have a prejudice, but it's just my utter disgust with censorship coming to the surface :) I have been around some time now to know what I mean (and I mean in life not in internet only)
I am a member!
I've used Tor browser to view this forum for several months without issues (doing it right now!). I'm currently using Tor v0.2.4.18-rc (not the primary browser bundle - though not why that should make a difference). I don't have issues when using Iceweasel in TAILS either. The only issues I have are with financial sites (e.g. eBay, Paypal) that track and link user IP addresses with their accounts (which bugs me and makes me want to eliminate those accounts). I use abrowser for those for now.
You should upgrade. But you probably already know that. The 3.5 lacks vidalia tho.