@switchingsocial @L1Cafe @rnickson I really don't know. But they do know what Tor is, and blocking its IPs just because they produce a lot of traffic is just playing dumb in order to avoid facing their real task (identify and stop genuine attacks), if not something else (and here I could readily accuse them of interfering with net neutrality).
If they're not willing (or not able) to provide the service they should be stopped.
@antonlopez @switchingsocial@mastodon.at @rnickson unfortunately, that is simply not true. They don’t just block Tor because they “produce a lot of traffic”, but because malicious actors often abuse the Tor service. This is a fact.
And given the fact that a single Tor exit node could be serving both a malicious actor and (for example) a journalist reporting on an oppressive regime, if both use Tor browser, Cloudflare is unable to perform fingerprinting, and thus serve challenges to both users.
The main problem is that due to malicious actions exit nodes are labeled as malicious but since they are constantly doing this, they never make it to get out of this state again. There are cooldown mechanisms in IP reputation systems that don't work for exit nodes.
That's one of the main reasons, why Cloduflare now pushes their onion service. But it requires explicit config by the domain owner, which most of them don't do.
@sheogorath Cloudflare onion service? That is very interesting. Where can I learn more?
@antonlopez @switchingsocial@mastodon.at @rnickson
Here you go: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/
And if you want to implement it yourself, you can have a look at my article about an own, self-hosted version:
@sheogorath nice! I will definitely be implementing this over the summer, many thanks!
@L1Cafe @switchingsocial @rnickson
That's what @rnickson said, not me. Either way, they block a huge percentage of genuine traffic, thus providing a lousy service to their customers (most of them unaware, I guess), and more importantly, restraining net access to Tor users, which I think it's shameful.
Btw, not only journalists under oppressive regimes use Tor on a daily basis. A lot of people just don't want to be traced given the state of affairs, and I think that's quite reasonable.