Although it's not an ideal situation, a few days ago a Google employee posted regarding access via Tor:

https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-talk/2012-October/025923.html

Hi, I'm that employee. That post is specifically about login to existing accounts that were created outside of Tor. We have a policy of phone verifying every signup via anonymizing proxies. If you signed up via Tor and didn't get asked to phone verify it means the list of exit nodes we're using isn't up to date, or there was a sync issue. Or you used an exit node that isn't in the list for some reason. We use this one: http://exitlist.torproject.org/exit-addresses We appreciate the offer to solve 1000 CAPTCHAs. Unfortunately the cost of 1000 CAPTCHAs is only about $1 on the open market, not exactly a high bar. The need for phone verification is unfortunate but real. If we had a better way to throttle abuse we'd use it. Unfortunately we don't. In the past I've researched and suggested using deposits of Bitcoin so we could set the price of an account in a more nuanced way, see here for a description of how it'd work: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contracts#Example_1:_Providing_a_deposit (bitcoin is my 20% project) For a variety of practical reasons I don't think that'll happen for Google accounts anytime soon, even assuming the software for it existed, which it doesn't yet. But I think it'd be great if people who are interested in making Tor usable with abusable services worked on the Bitcoin approach. I'd start by integrating with MediaWiki, blogging platforms etc, forum software etc, so if people want to run wikis/forums/blogs as hidden services or otherwise they have a way to make spam expensive without using the proxy of identity. Of course it does move the problem to be "how can I acquire Bitcoin?" but you get unlinkability. Even if the Bitcoin seller you used knows your identity, the recipient of the coins does not. So I'm afraid we don't have a good solution for people who want to sign up to Google anonymously today beyond buying accounts and getting unlinkability that way, but as I said, that's against our terms of service and can easily be confused with abuse so it's somewhat dangerous. thanks -mike _______________________________________________ tor-talk mailing list tor-talk@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-talk ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE