anonymously donate

Well, very few places take cash or money order in the mail. Call them stupid to not take the money. Then there's AML with bitcoin, etc.

a persistent nym

Building a persistent nym is handy if you wish to establish such a personage for compartemented tasks, etc. However, there are linkable nyms and unlinkable ones. Advocating that users or sites evolve to support only linkable nyms is not a good idea. For example, the 'invite' or 'cell number' type nym systems are an example of terrible privacy policy. People need the ability to create new, unlinked, taint free, accounts whenever they want. They many need more than one persona, or to come back as a fresh incarnation of themselves when up against unwarranted/irrational dislike.

But no practical software infrastructure exists for [nym tech].

Linkable nyms are worthless for some people and purposes, so I've no problem with that lack. If I ran a system, I would allow signups from anywhere, no 'recovery' email, no name, no cell, no geoip. Nothing but username, password, and a few strong captchas to keep out the bots. Maybe even a time delay (n days) to calm down the impulse users. AND definitely... a policy that allows me to nuke misbehaving accounts at will. Because let's be honest, if you've got the helpdesk cycles to learn all about VPN's, scrape proxy lists, scrape Tor, sink ip's etc... you've surely got it to sink accounts on verifiable abuse reports. Come on people, hitting 'delete' just isn't all that hard, especially when your policy permits it. Do NOT penalize those who need multiple random unlinked accounts by blocking ip's, making up nym systems, etc. Penalize the accounts that act up. They are the bad ones, not the former.

This isn't something the Tor Project needs to fix except through continued marketing and education.

I would actually donate much more to Tor/EFF project if I could earmark it for a formal emissary to talk with some of the sites I've seen implementing bad policy. And hopefully report back to me with the positive results ...

I'd suggest emailing the administrator of the forums you're having trouble with ... and explain what Tor is ...

... because when I do (under a separate unlinkable nym of course), I end up ignored as the expendable small guy.

Tor is more of a hack to give back some privacy. To bring things more in line with the romantic image of the Internet. Because people want to see the Internet as a nice place where people go to share ideas

Exactly! And when I can't use these sites in perfectly good, responsible, creative and nice ways... because they have implemented crap blocking policies... it pisses me the fuck off. Anonymous != evil. That is what we need to be teaching. _______________________________________________ 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