On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:27:12AM -0400, Jimmy Wales wrote:

But now we're back to the question: how can Tor be improved to deal with this very serious and important problem? What are the steps that might be taken, however imperfect, to reduce the amount of abuse coming from Tor nodes?

I think that we can agree that there are short-term and long-term solutions to this problem. In the short-term, we can block Tor nodes by routing address and develop special mechanisms to allow Tor users to edit Wikipedia content anyway. We can do this either via some sort of indirection or via some sort of special change to Wikipedia itself, working around the limitations in Mediawiki. We can focus on the short-term for now. However, I think that most proponents of Tor believe that in the long-term, Wikipedia should support location-independent users. So we need a plan going forward, and this plan should be sufficiently general to apply to any location-independent users, not just users of Tor. I think that many of us hope that some day the Internet will be flat and routing information will be useless in tracking identity or reputation. This will be difficult to achieve, but it is certainly my hope. As such, I am loath to encourage the design of systems that require any form of access control at the network layer, and I believe that the right thing to do is avoid such temptation, even if software tools like Mediawiki appear to be designed with network-layer access control in mind. Geoff ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]