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Re: Wikipedia & Tor & ... moderators?



A suggestion on this: I just remembered the "hidden" servers....there was one listed on Privoxy's page, I believe, that can only be accessed by someone using a tor/Privoxy combination. Perhaps our possible Chinese dissident could post her/his edits and additions on such a server, have them reviewed by someone at Wikipedia, and if they were non-vandalizing type posts, they could then be added to the Wikipedia page.
I realize that this violates Wikipedia's open-source, anyone can edit philosophy to an extent, as someone would have to read and review these entries. It would also put additional burdens on Wikipedia's staff. But it would allow both the free flow of information and the protection of privacy.
As an experiment, this might be tried on Wikinews first.
Ladies and gentlemen, I humbly submit to you that the rights of the individual (Tor) and the availability of fora for the expression of free speech (Wikipedia) are both measures of how a civilization's progress. If we can figure out some sort of solution to this, we'll have solved one of the great problems of our age.


CTW
Whereabouts Unknown ;-)


Jimmy Wales said the following on 9/28/2005 7:05 AM:

Eugen Leitl wrote:


If you're using them, you can just add Tor exit points into your
RBL subscription, in the unlikely case they are not already there
(trust me, they will be there).



Yes, we are usually blocking Tor exit points as a part of our broader blacklisting strategy. (We don't use outside services for this.)

This works just fine for us -- with the side effect that Tor is that
much less useful for the people we want it to be able to help.



As long as Tor doesn't support pseudonyms, and prestige accounting
there won't be a better way. Anonymity by definition is associated
with zero prestige. Current Tor is designed for anonymity, not
pseudonymity. A hidden trusted server could be used as a hack to
implement pseudonyms and prestige tracking. This would not scale,
and be easy to DoS, however.

If it is not to be a hack a distributed cryptographic filestore
need to be added to the Tor client. It would require nym prestige
to prevent floods. This is not easy to get right.




I am not an expert on the design of such things, and I only offer what
seem to me to be fairly straightforward ways of dealing with this
problem.  I am well aware that getting it right is not easy.  But it is
not an easy task that we have chosen for ourselves, so try we must.



I hope I'm being clear. From your comments, I'm having the
impression we're talking orthogonally to each other.



The main thing I want people to take away from this conversation is that answering questions about abuse of services like Wikipedia by attacking Wikipedia as privacy-hating or by saying that we should ask people for a credit card before editing or etc. etc. is not acceptable. It is important _for Tor_ for the _goals of Tor_ that these problems be solved to the maximal extent possible _by Tor_.

Wikipedia is a friend; we will do what we can.  But you're not designing
a system which should only be usable with privacy-friendly websites.
You're designing a system which, to the end user, should to the maximal
extent possible allow them to speak privately and _on equal footing with
everyone else on the Internet_.