Re: [tor-talk] Pissed off about Blacklists, and what to do?

[Andrew Lewman <andrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 08, 2014 at 05:22:14AM -0500, grarpamp@xxxxxxxxx wrote 3.6K bytes in 0 lines about:
: Theory: Tor is being blocked mostly due to negative news media
: perception, and kneejerk catchall solutions taking the cheap and
: dumb route to systems and policy... not due to balanced acceptable
: facts and specific measures therein... and you have to combat those
: errors appropriately with facts and things of your own.

One situation not helping the overall blocking situation is the censorship
companies enable tor blocking by default. Company A buys some equipment,
takes the defaults, and therefore blocks Tor. There was never a discussion
about what should or should not have been blocked. It's automatic in
the firewall/nat/gateway/perimeter device. Our own funders at the NSF
and State Dept have run into this exact situation. The Program Managers
try to visit torproject.org, or wiki.torproject.org, and are told Tor
is a proxy/circumvention site and blocked for that reason. The PM's sane
response is "yes, this is exactly why we fund them!" And then the PM runs
into the bureaucracy of IT and gives up. They then just bring to work
TorBrowser on a USB drive and circumvent their own IT censorship, like
millions of citizens do daily with their governments.

Perhaps focusing efforts to stop the censorware providers from
blocking Tor by default will go a long way to making the Internet more
tor-friendly.

-- 
Andrew
pgp 0x6B4D6475
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