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Re: Open Proxy Monitors



The risk I worry about is that IRC operators will develop technology to
create a list of onion routers and publish the list.  Internet service
providers will use this list to shut down operators of Tor nodes
systematically, despite the fact that nobody seems to care about what
ordb says about open mail relays, because they will be pressured by
governments and intellectual property rights owners, since anonymity
threatens their interests.

Geoff

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 10:48:14PM +0200, Thomas Sj?gren wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 12:56:16PM -0700, Hee So wrote:
> > On some IRC channels, being anonymous via an open proxy will
> > cause "you" to get banned. 
> 
> Yes, some freenode servers has already started doing this.
> 
> > Since Tor is in large part a
> > SOCKS proxy, I could envision someone to extend the existing
> > open proxy monitors to search for ORs (or more simply download
> > the list of routers from the directory server) and ban those.
> 
> Will probably happen is people start using Tor as a way to flood channels 
> or just making the work of channel operators work so  much harder.
> 
> > Once that happens, does this mean Tor will no longer be useable
> > to IRC? and more generally, to any other target that bans the
> > use of open proxies?  I don't see anything in the design that
> > would prevent this from happening.
>  
> I'm no expert about IRC so correct me if i'm wrong, but the problem with 
> IRC for example is that it bans hosts. This is of course easily bypassed
> with the help of Tor and there is not much to do about it (from a IRC
> server admin pov) besides banning the exit nodes.
> 
> SILC [1] is using a more sensible approach in my opinion, the Client ID, 
> nickname, username, host name and/or public key may be used to ban
> someone.  
> 
> [1] www.silcnet.org
> 
> /Thomas
> -- 
> == Encrypted e-mails preferred | GPG KeyID: 114AA85C
> --


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