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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm strongly against spam filtering for email. Spam filters are fundamentally security-through-obscurity. I mean, they don't protect your email from targeted bombing attacks or phishing. If you need spam filters to operate your email on a day-to-day basis, then the security of your email is fundamentally broken.

/s, obviously, I hope.

Blocking Tor isn't a security measure, it's a nuisance reduction measure.

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>This is why I'm strongly against spam filtering for email. Spam filters are fundamentally security-through-obscurity. I mean, they don't protect your email from targeted bombing attacks or phishing. If you need spam filters to operate your email on a day-to-day basis, then the security of your email is fundamentally broken.

You kid, but this is completely true Email is simply an incredibly flawed, outdated and broken system, especially when used without PGP. Phishing is a massive problem, and it has only continued to grow in scale because spam, uh... finds a way. At the same time, spam filters regularly create false positives, making email an unreliable transport (leading "oops, it got lost in my spam folder").

>Blocking Tor isn't a security measure, it's a nuisance reduction measure.

You should block all IP space, this will reduce nuisances by 100%. In fact, this will save you from having to consider any real security practices or do your job properly.

The correct analogy here would be implementing spam filtering by blocking large segments of email addresses. Eg, dropping mail from all non microsoft/gmail domains (as a nuisance reduction measure!), with predictable impact on smaller providers and self hosted email.

I think it would be sensible to block new account registrations with addresses from email address aliasing services (e.g. duck.com) or disposable email address services (e.g. mailinator.com).

You're reframing this to make Tor look a lot better than it is. The signal:noise ratio for Tor is epsilon. It's almost entirely garbage. If a network generated spam at rates analogous to network traffic from Tor, yes, I guarantee that network would be on every single email service's block list.

Tor's advocates in this thread keep trying to argue it from ideology, as though anybody's obligated to deal with Tor traffic on principle alone, and not one of them so far has tried to argue that Tor is not 90+% bots and garbage. Funny, that.

With all the blocks in place, is it ever possible to know whether the 90% is still an innate effect of Tor, or actually an effect of sites blocking Tor?

I have Tor installed, figured it would be worth adding my boring browsing to the mix sometimes, but since most sites I try to load block Tor exits, Tor browser now sits unused.

On the other hand, if I woke up tomorrow deciding to start a bot farm or whatever other malicious thing, or course I'd be interested in hiding through Tor and might try it again (don't worry, I won't wake up that way).

So even if a hypothetical 100% of global internet users really wanted to do all their browsing through Tor, they might all reach the same conclusion as me that too many sites are blocked and therefore leave Tor to mostly bad traffic. Of course it's nowhere near 100%, but hopefully you see my point that the sites blocking Tor IPs (and I absolutely appreciate why) can become a self-fulfilling prophecy - and I'm not sure how you'd get out of that loop?

And if everyone blocks all non-gmail addresses then soon enough the snr of non-gmail addresses will also be garbage because you are actively preventing any legitimate user from using them.

I am strongly against any kind of spam filtering that drops/rejects messages that the recipient did not intentionally configure for those kinds of messages. Sorting suspicious mail into a separate folder is fine, preventing two humans from communicaing based on heuristics, IP block reputation and other such bs is not.

Outlook did that actually (preventing two humans from communication without reason)

https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22305/entire-ip-r...

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