[arma at mit.edu: Re: Wikipedia & Tor]

[Bill Stewart]

At 05:37 PM 9/27/2005, lists wrote:
>Tyler Durden wrote:
>>Sorry...I don't understand...why would psuedonymity services be provided 
>>within Tor?
>
>I find the concept of having both pseudonymous and anonymous traffic
>through TOR quite interesting. In some cases, you really do wish to just
>....
>TOR itself does not necessarily have to deal with this. There could be
>services flowing through TOR that provide this. However, TOR nodes
>implementing pseudonymous traffic for their own network seems more
>natural and easier to do.

One way to build a psuedo-pseudonymous mechanism to hang off of Tor
that would be easy for the Wikipedians to deal with
would be to have a server that lets you connect to it using Tor,
log in using some authentication protocol or other,
then have it generate different outgoing addresses based on your ID.
So user #37 gets to initiate connections from 10.0.0.37,
   user #258 gets to initiate connections from 10.0.1.2, etc.

The reason to use Tor mechanisms is to make connection
potentially easier by reducing the number of mechanisms a client needs;
the reason to use different IP addresses is for Wikipedia's convenience.
It's mainly useful in environments where you can use private address space,
so if you're running it on a Tor-friendly location as opposed to
Wikipedia's rack space, you might want to tunnel it across the Internet
through something other mechanism such as GRE/L2TP/IPSEC/etc.