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Comment by john_the_writer | Hacker News Reader

The problem with TOR is CloudFlare and the likes. Many exit nodes are blocked, so you cannot reasonably get to a heap of sites. If I can't get to sites because they're blocked, then I'm not really on the internet.

Not TOR's fault, but it is something holding it back. Sadly.

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Tor's ability to use exit nodes is much less interesting to me than Tor-hosted Onion sites. I wish more sites also offered an onion.

Agree. Recently, my favorite childhood imageboard (711chan.net) came back online, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they offer the site via Tor, including using the Onion-Location header to make the browser aware of this fact.

Interestingly, they allow Tor users to post. It's an anonymous imageboard with no CAPTCHA, so I'm not sure how they intend to address spam this way.

It's an image board? I've been told that it's a really bad idea to allow image uploads from Tor at all, at least without the requirement of having an account that can be wiped out all at once. I think there was an idea to let Tor users pick from a standard palette of images, but be prevented from uploading their own.

> 711chan.net

Any time I see these chan sites, it kind of stuns me about how racist they are relative to anything else on the internet.

Doesn't seem worse than Reddit or Facebook to me. Heck, even though it isn't as obvious the amount of negativity on HN about everything Chinese is basically the same racism, just written in ways to avoid getting removed.

Did you visit the site? They have multiple boards on the sidebar that are explicitly dedicated to racism. One of them is just named “[Nig]s”. There’s a picture in the sean one with a 1488 behind pixel black people.

I cant be racist - some of my best friends are blacks.

It's not websites, it's people. Freedom of speech + anonymity just allow people showing who they really are.

I think it’s more like that these boards attract a specific type of person, not people in general. People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well. That’s why they’re banned off of most of the internet and the real world.

>People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well

Can't resonate. In my part of the world, people are generally racist.

The way online racists act is very different from general racism irl. It’s a much more hateful form and seems a bit more all over the place. They won’t just hate one ethnic group, they’ll hate everything and everyone that isn’t exactly like them.

> People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well

People are generally awful people as well.

Most people are either pleasant or neutral irl. There are no consequences for what you say online so people tend to be their worst on the internet. If people were generally awful, we wouldn't have any form of society anywhere in the world.

Anonymity also makes it really easy to simulate something if you want to imply something about human nature. Thats luckily something that is fixable client side. Just be less gullible.

Keep in mind that much of that is a constant struggle between moderating and Zersetzung. If somebody doesnt like free discourse, all they have to do is increase the moderation burden for such sites. Knowing full well, that the more rules you have and try to enforce, the more of an echochamber you become.

Still beats the toxic effects of curating identities in an social media echochamber. Dedicated boards also work as plumbing on chans.

edit: Totalitarians are also not shy about employing Zersetzung. For example, the CREST Research ("Mining the Chans") people are very open about attacking chans through AI generated garbage/extremism content to make them unusable. So chances are high that this is what you are seeing and reacting to.

>Interestingly, they allow Tor users to post. It's an anonymous imageboard with no CAPTCHA, so I'm not sure how they intend to address spam this way.

Other sites use proof of work here

Yeah I block tor for account registrations for one of the worlds largest social media apps. It’s nearly all abuse. Though I let tor access if you already have an account.

The Tor developers were eager a few years ago to talk with people who were blocking Tor to see if they could help find alternatives. I realize you've probably thought about this a lot already, but have you ever discussed it with them? Alternatively, do you think you could explain more about the kinds of abuse that are typical when people sign up over Tor?

I realize that might come across as naive, because it's not as though they somehow know more about your abuse problems than you do, and it's also unlikely that they know something obscure about Tor that would turn out to be surprising and important for you. But they're certainly motivated to see if they can help people think of alternatives.

(I'm not actively involved with Tor right now, but I've been pretty close to the project in the past.)

Yes, but this article was very meticulous about only referring to the experience of using onion services. Native Tor. Kind of imagining a ubiquitous onion router over TLS and DNS, which is a bit disingenuous but accurate on the technical front.

40 years ago there were competing protocols to DNS, its just not common to think of it that way anymore.

Yea I mostly use LibreWolf now as Tor is too slow and too many services block it and just use it to read (many news sites have tor addresses now). But another reason to support the project is that a lot of the anti-fingerprinting innovations developed by the Tor project eventually makes their way to more usable browsers. The Tor project gets a large bit of funding to find and patch privacy holes in their Firefox-based browser ― the solutions they come up with can often be implemented in other Firefox browsers.

You should give a look at Mullvad Browser, it has been developed in collaboration with the tor project and you have no latency issues

Can you tor to a vpn then that gives you some more choice over origin server and IP

what is tor adding to that setup?

Anonymity. Now the VPN operators and people who are watching the VPN logs don't know your IP.

yes. and also if tor is compromised you have the vpn as a layer of defence.

and how do you get access to the VPN?

all VPNs need authentication and payments, otherwise your just connecting to another open network with the same issues as TOR.

if you make payments, and then auth on connection, they "know" who you are and TOR at the start is not giving you anything

1. Not all VPNs are paid, a lot of free VPNs and open proxies

2. Not all payment methods are connected to your identity. Mullvad for example accepts cash in an envelope, or cryptocurrency payments.

Cloudflare does not enforce tor blocking. Webmasters who use Cloudflare services, are making a choice to block tor. Cloudflare is just a tool, like iptables.

Okta completely block it so it has to be disabled for anything work related to, which is kinda annoying.

Is Cloudfare not a large exit node for Tor?

Perhaps I don't know how it works, but I would just imagine they would be, since Tor seems like it's mostly geared towards increasing availability of internet resources, and that aligns with Cloudfare.

It's written "Tor", not "TOR".

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