Tell HN: I Can't Login to HN with Tor | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I Can't Login to HN with Tor

Having just now read that the NSA is stepping up its surveillance of the Internet, I decided to resume my previous practice of using the Tor Browser Bundle to hang out online. I'm doing this even when I have no reason to expect anonymity nor privacy.

My reasoning is that for me to transmit encrypted traffic will provide some cover for those who are working for legitimate regime change.

But I have to post this from the stock Firefox. When I try to login to HN with Tor, while my login is not rejected I'm not logged-in. That is, at the top right of the page is "login" rather than "MichaelCrawford".

Doubtlessly this is done on purpose to keep a lid on the crapflooders and linkspammers, however some means should be found to enable legitimate HN members to use Tor.

View on HN

While I admire the sentiment underpinning your reasoning, I don't see it as obviously beneficial toward YC's purposes in running HN. Given that Tor is correlated with spam and such, allowing legitimate uses creates the messy problem of separating legitimate use from illegitimate in real time with the potential cost of a whitelist mistake being more detrimental to the community than simply banning Tor.

To put it in marketing terms, banning Tor is simply a segmentation decision and another way in which HN isn't designed to be all things to all people.

Your comment paints HN as anti-Tor. That isn't the case.

My past communications with dang, under a different identity, led me to believe that they want to accommodate Tor users. They just don't want spam.

My comments were intended to convey my belief that supporting Tor does not make business sense for YC at this time. This is based, in part, on reading dang's comments on the subject. It is also based on my understanding of how business works, though I will be quick to admit that my understanding of that may in fact be a misunderstanding.

"how business works"

Business isn't always about maximizing shareholder value. Consider that Dave Johnson once shut Working Software down for an afternoon so we could see Malcolm X on the company dime.

Allowing/Not Allowing Tor is more architectural decision than team-building exercise. By which I mean the proposal draws a dependency on a legitimate/illegitimate user service and then depends on its ongoing instrumentation and adds the overhead of another thing to monitor and something else for users to complain about if Tor is turned off again.

So I'm not really talking about "maximizing shareholder value" and anyway, I think YC has partners rather than shareholders as is the case with most organizations optimized for investing [but I'm just speculating and being pedantic]. What I am talking about is market segmentation, and its role on HN. It's not trying to be Facebook and segments out people who want to use it like Facebook...and that's probably why I enjoy it more.

Hope all is well.

This is somewhat unrelated to your question but I've always wondered.

Why use Tor to access an account created outside of Tor? You've basically negated the reason(s) to use it.

I don't mean this to be hostile--I'm simply genuinely curious.

Edit: Wow, did not expect downvotes. I guess the reply above answers my question though. Legitimate people using it for legitimate purpose.. removing the ability for people to say 'everyone using Tor must have something to hide'.

I use it to defeat geolocation as well as analytics.

Even if the website I'm visiting is unencrypted, no one is going to know where I am, who I am or what I am like.

For the record, I am logged in over Tor - so if there is a block it appears to be inconsistent.

Second anec-data point, I'm logged in via TBB right now too. I get captcha-ed when I first hot the site over TOR, but it works "as expected" once past that.

(It wouldn't surprise me too much if some TOR exits end up filtered transiently due to abuse - it might be worth refreshing your circuit (or waiting ~10mins for the TBB to do it as usual))

>My reasoning is that for me to transmit encrypted traffic will provide some cover for those who are working for legitimate regime change.

You only "provide cover" for others if you run a relay, bridge, or exit node.

Yes you do, and running a relay/bridge/exit node doesn't provide cover at all, it just improves the network. The "cover" here is in the reduced probability that an end-user is a subversive.

I make a point of logging in to sites like my local government websites over TOR every now and then to do completely normal and personally identifying things there. I want there to be logfiles full of obviously non evil uses of TOR out there.

How does it improve the network, but not provide cover? That is bass ackwards reasoning.

"Providing cover" includes increasing the anonymity set.

Anonymity means there is an equal distribution of probability that any device connected to a network is the one sending the message.

If you have 3,000 exit nodes and 5,000 exit nodes, but 10 people using the network, oppressive governments have a higher chance of fingering a culprit than if there were, say, 1,000,000 people using the network.

That's what is meant by providing cover here.

Yeah I tried to log in with TOR recently, and it showed me a weird captcha, in a different language. I was frankly ashamed and disappointed.

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