Text 9428, 54 rader
Skriven 2010-07-25 09:37:15 av Michiel van der Vlist (2:280/5555)
     Kommentar till en text av Robert Bashe (2:2448/44)
Ärende: Good, free email addresses in the States
================================================
Hello Bob,

On Friday July 23 2010 08:57, you wrote to me:

 MV>> I for one see no reason to block the services I offer for users of
 MV>> the TOR system. Do you?

 RB> All of which begs the question as to _how_ you would go about
 RB> "blocking" Tor nodes. You might be able to find a few if you install
 RB> and use Tor yourself, but the situation changes from day to day, and
 RB> you'd never be able to keep up. Who exactly _is_ an exit node? And
 RB> when - now, in the past or in the future? This is not a trivial
 RB> technical question.

Indeed. When I was new to the internet and started receiving spam, I used to
put the e-mail addresses of the the spammers in a blackist. It did not take me
long to find out it was an exercise in futility.

I do not know how hard it would be to block tor exit nodes. I do not even find
it worth while to spend time on finding out how hard it is, let alone actually
try blocking them. It is an exercise in futility. I doubt it will ever be
effective and who knows with how many false positives.

I have not used tor myself. I do make use of ixquick though, it is a meta
search engine with an anonymiser. I shy away from google as they log search
activity. On a US based server and hence accessible by the US spooks.

If you use tor again, keep this in mind:

[ Wikipedia ]
Tor cannot and does not attempt to protect against monitoring of traffic at the
boundaries of the Tor network, i.e., the traffic entering and exiting the
network.[7] The United States government, for example, has the capability to
monitor any broadband Internet traffic using devices mandated by the
Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) and can therefore
legally monitor either end of a Tor connection if it originates or terminates
in the US. While Tor does provide protection against traffic analysis, it
cannot prevent traffic confirmation (also called end-to-end correlation).[7]


If the powers that be follow the same line of thinking as some of our friends
here, they may *focus* on tor exit nodes when monitoring traffic. Ans so when
using tor, you may get the opposite of what you ant. Instead of staying
anonymous, you may draw attention to yourself.

 RB> I personally think that anyone who believes he can do this is
 RB> deceiving himself.

So do I.

Cheers, Michiel

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