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Comment by akavel | Hacker News Reader

I've recently tried using FB via TOR (Browser) for the first time, but was unable. After entering the onion address and my FB credentials, I was informed that the account is temporarily blocked (presumably because of first access via TOR). I was presented with an option of unblocking it by recognizing a few photos of friends and matching them to names - but unfortunately, all those photos showed as blank, white squares!

So, I wasn't able to login via TOR via the purposefully created .onion address. Also, sent an issue report via non-TOR login about this, but never got any response.

Note also that this seems to mean to me, that there may be people who are cut off from FB via TOR same as me, but who don't even have a way to notify FB about the fact. And thus not having any chance of having the bug fixed.

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That's a standard challenge if you try to log into your FB account from a new machine / IP address that geolocates somewhere you don't typically seem to be. Of course, that's pretty ironic since your Tor exit could be anywhere, but it's not specific to Tor anyhow. I have seen the same behavior using VPN, too.

There isn't an exit when accessing an onion address - the identity of the client-chosen part of the circuit would be unknown to the hidden service operator.

The problem is not the existence of the challenge. The problem is it is broken in a fresh, unmodified install of the TOR Browser. Sorry, but I can't recognize a pure white square properly as a person.

That test is a Captcha. You failed it. Are you sure you are not a robot? Sorry to announce it to you like that...

> but unfortunately, all those photos showed as blank, white squares!

It sounds like the test was just broken.

Or he's a robot and is just claiming to have seen blank white squares.

Report this as a bug and it will get routed to Alec and promptly fixed. The issue here is that constructing the page requires pullling from different places (cdn, etc) and sometimes someone changes the way things are set up internally to deliver this and the person making the changes is not aware of the mods needed to deal with the .onion support.

As I said, I've already reported as a bug via FB, weeks ago, haven't heard from anybody since then. Is there some other way I should use? As to the root cause, that's what I suspected, and it also tells me that the TOR gateway seems not well covered by tests and thus prone to breaking. And you won't know, as TOR users have no way to report in-band.

So I didn't tell you this or suggest it in public, but it helps to sometimes use that _other_ social network to tell FB folks that something is not working. A lot of user reports of Tor<->FB issues get to the appropriate team in the London office via Twitter...

Ehmh. Now... I'm semi-embarassed to admit that I don't use Twitter. (Although really, not really even semi.) And at this point, I don't think I care enough. Also, as much as I'm grateful to you for following up and trying your best at helping me find a contact channel, please note I've already tried two channels. The in-FB one, which I'd expect could be treated with some seriousness, then HN. Is it still not enough? am I to believe if I tried Twitter someone would suddenly magically care? I'm hard pressed. And I don't care enough to beg and dance for however long it would have to take; especially given that this already signals to me that the FB team simply doesn't care either. So even if I succeeded in persisting and breaking through, the chance is big it'd soon break in some other way. And unfortunately I don't plan on becoming unpaid full-time FB QA.

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