On Sun, Jul 1, 2012, at 15:32, Sam Whited wrote:

On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 3:17 PM, || N#NN || wrote:

...

So spammers abuse tor...

Yes, they always have, and probably always will.

I feel there is a need to dispell some wonderful magic of the modern society: the World has always been large. Even if it takes a lot less to cover large distances, the World is still large. And that might mean, among others, diverse too. A second spell of the modern society is safety. The World has always been both comfortable and unsafe in various proportions. There are cries about protecting someone or something. But that was never ever in history a given. Oh, food should be free of additives like in the good old days. Actually in the good old days it was a lor more probable to eat rotten meat and not have the faintest idea that going vegan was an option. Sure, for the demigods breed in the last decades the spectre of cancer might mean dying of fear, but less than a century ago rotten food would mean potential death tomorrow as an alternative to starvation today. Phobos had a wonderful article about this recently on the Tor blog [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/real-name-internet-versus-reality] but people still expect that terrorism should come from a virtual entity far far away and not from the local corrupt cop [http://socialistworker.org/2012/06/21/nypd-kills-again] Myself I'm not shure all spammers turn a profit, but they all are ready to employ every mean available to push their merchandise. This doesn't mean checking the identity would do any good as they can impersonate anybody if willing. But that goes to the third issue of the modern society: mistaken an identity with a number. That would pretty much go with Michel Foucault and his prison society, because most people see themselves as obedient inmates. They are the national ID number or the SSN. And not much more. That's why there was so much fuss about the birth certificate of a presidential candidate and less about what the man was about to do. Back in the days when there was no registration people would build up some fame and invoke some ancestry. Or they were practically nobody. Up to a certain point in history everybody was an anonym and only few could break through to become somebody. Superficially things seem to have reversed, but it's a fake assumption. I still can't differentiate most of the people I pass each day. They are still nobodies. But they are proud to show a number: proof of uniqueness.

Tor is designed to keep people anonymous; this works for both the good guys, and the bad. This isn't something the Tor Project needs to fix except through continued marketing and education. I'd suggest emailing the administrator of the forums you're having trouble with (and possibly the IP blacklist site) and explain what Tor is, a bit about how it works, and exactly why it's beneficial for them to whitelist Tor exit nodes. Maybe you can convince them to change their minds.

Actually blocking Tor won't help. A few sane filtering measures do. Have people create an account. Have someone take a look at that list from time to time. Generated or random users usually can be flagged easily. Ask people to do some customization to the account before posting. Quarantine the first few messages or a certain amount of time. Have a button or link called breportb and let the other users report messages. Quarantine the account and ask for an explanation from the offender. Blocking IPs makes sense only when you are Wikipedia and have a mission to let the government agencies have their fair chance of tweaking the facts. As I've never seen anything resembling closer the official newspaper of Airstrip One than Wikipedia. I don't feel Tor is designed to keep people anonymous. 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 and not what it is: a military project hack done by some unimaginative blokes who were happy to have things working so they could go to video games arcade or just sleep. Most of the protocols used to connect computers are horribly designed by people who can barely understand the concept of consequence. Probably it's not their fault as the educational system everywhere splits the curricula into sciences and humanities. And all the philosophy and ethics are given to the people with no tech background. _______________________________________________ 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