Re: livejournal ban tor-nodes

[James Brown <jbrownfirst@xxxxxxxxx>]

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Jacob Appelbaum wrote:

> Hello again,
> 
> In summary:
> Mike Perry and I just had a visit to the San Francisco Livejournal
> office. The servers at LJ are currently being abused by two users in
> Russia. They are currently blocking access to all of the Tor exit nodes
> with a rather crufty (but effective) screen scrape of some Tor status
> page. They'd like to lift this ban and they'd like to see the abuse
> stop. They recognize that many legitimate users are now out in the cold
> and they'd like to allow Tor to access LJ.
> 
> The service abusing their systems is http://lj2rss.net.ru/; lj2rss
> provides a user with an RSS feed of their LJ friends page (normally a
> paid service). LJ considers this abuse and has attempted to block this
> service. Lj2rss was previously run through basic HTTP proxies. It has
> apparently evolved as a service. The lj2rss people decided to ditch HTTP
> proxies for the public Tor network. This has caused LJ to filter _all_
> access from the Tor network as a quick hack to block their service. LJ
> is unhappy with this as they realize this means that many people are not
> able to reach LJ. They want to find a solution to this total method of
> blocking. They only want to stop lj2rss and not everyone who actually
> needs Tor to legitimately use LJ.
> 
> We've suggested that rather than outright blocking, users should be
> redirected (http 302 rather than 502) to a status page explaining the
> outage information. We've also suggested they can have user puzzles or
> require a specific login (paid accounts or flagged in some way). As far
> as I can tell, this is not a conspiracy by SUP or any other measure
> taken on behalf of SUP. The sysadmins at LJ are simply trying to combat
> someone abusing their service.
> 
> LJ said that they're going to change their status page shortly to
> explain the block. They're also working on methods to block the lj2rss
> people and not every single user of the Tor network. I hope this is
> helpful and that the users of Tor will be able to access LJ services
> again shortly.
> 
> Best,
> Jacob
> 

Very thanks.
But did they say you about a character of that abuse?
I thin that only an RSS feed of  LJ friends pages is not a serious
ground for blocking the Tor network.
If they did such not by order of the SUP for protection of the Russian
dictatorship I can't understand why the SUP by they 2 years ago. For
latent  shadowing against Russian oppositionists for the Federal
security service of Russia?
I was very sleepy when you wrote your letter (it was about 3 a.m at my
place) and I coudn't recognize that I could try ask them a question
concerning the next.
By the information of Russian press (see, particularly
http://www.newsru.com/russia/10nov2009/vkontakte.html ) the secret
services of Russia arrested estimated murders of Markelov (many people
in Russia think that they are not real murders because real economic
base of Markelov's murder was deforestation of the Khimki forest against
which Markelov fighted and any version about the revenge of
"nationalists" have not under it real economic and money base and seems
very absurd) through LJ activity of them.
In accordance with this information they had access to the LJ not
through the Tor but through the specific public wifi - so-called WIMAX,
from account registered on assumed name.
So, the Russian secret services had needed an information about
ip-addresses of those users of the LJ for computing their through 	
triangulation with  beam gain antennas.
So, we can suspect that those ip-addresses were given to Russian secret
services by the SUP besides the official inquiry of Russian authorities
to the US authorities (as I know there is not an agreement on mutual
assistance in criminal matters between Russia and the USA).
If it was really so, it was an obvious interference of Russian
government in internal affairs of the USA in accordance with
international law.
I don't know about the US criminal law but such actions are examined as
an espionage by the Russain Criminal Code.
I think that the notion of an espionage is approximately equal in all
countries.
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