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Re: Banned from Slashdot



maillist wrote:
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Just encountered this:



Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot
...due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address --

I'm new around here, and this may be covered territory or flamebait, but I think this is really great. "Problems" with IP-to-human mapping will eventually become burdensome, and webmasters (far and away the most technologically backwards people using the Internet today) will use the well-designed end-to-end cryptographic features of their chosen medium.


It is ridiculous that you can't use Slashdot over SSL. In as much as your reputation (on Slashdot, and perhaps in wider geek circles) might be impacted if your account is used for purposes other than your own, you would expect the Slashdot admins to come up with a way to prevent your cookies from being hijacked. But, of course, they don't. Instead they rely on sending your identity in the clear, and cooking up mostly-broken mechanisms to regulate behavior based on packet routing information, which is oblique at best.

I think of tor as a kind of gigantic open wifi network. You wouldn't want to be sending your login information in the clear over some unencrypted 802.11b link, so why would you want to send that information in the clear over another network where it can be observed in transit (by which I mean any and all networks)? Furthermore, why continue to assume that an IP address maps to a person or behavior, in a world where I can use any one of literally hundreds of 802.11 access points that are in range of my home (and anyone can use mine), and any person can use tor and have their packets popping out all over the planet? Indeed, the notion of IP banning is triply ridiculous in a system where I can use my ISP's website to provision a new IP address and reliquish my old ones.

I hope I haven't strayed too far from the topic. My main point is that I hope we all get banned from Slashdot someday, to finally prove the absurdity of banning IP addresses.

-jwb