<story><title>The Trouble with CloudFlare</title><url>https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trouble-cloudflare</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scurvy</author><text>Maybe I&amp;#x27;m a cranky, old-school network operator, but this is a very cut and dry problem. Tor runs a network that is rife with abuse and fraud. Tor needs to clean up and police its network. If it doesn&amp;#x27;t, it will be put on blacklists and customers will take active measures to block traffic from it.&lt;p&gt;This is no different than a network or AS that is spammer friendly, botnet friendly, carder friendly, etc. All of those networks eventually end up on blacklists or Spamhaus lists and their efficacy goes down. Eventually, the network dies out and the criminals move somewhere else. Yes, it&amp;#x27;s a game of whack-a-mole, but it&amp;#x27;s proven to work well.&lt;p&gt;I know Tor doesn&amp;#x27;t want to be in the network regulation business, but they need to be if they want their product to thrive. Otherwise, good bye Tor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danielrhodes</author><text>This is exactly what is wrong with this form of idealism. People create these things which remove accountability&amp;#x2F;reputation, it works great for awhile and is lots of fun (just like a mask party), and then the leeches move in and use it for spam&amp;#x2F;trolling&amp;#x2F;illegal stuff. It&amp;#x27;s usually the leeches who are the real long-term beneficiaries of these kinds of networks. However, the idealistic people who originally created it don&amp;#x27;t want to admit that their experiment failed and they actually created something which is now serving the interests of something not so idealistic and perhaps even quite sinister.&lt;p&gt;Bitcoin has the same issue: there are lots of legit uses of it, but to make it a good widely used currency, a reputation system is going to emerge, and from there you&amp;#x27;ve already erased half the benefits of using Bitcoin. However, in the mean time Bitcoin is used by a bunch of people purely interested in speculation or as a way of avoiding taxes&amp;#x2F;money laundering laws&amp;#x2F;etc. There are people, just like Tor, using it for legit reasons, but my bet it&amp;#x27;s for mostly reasons nobody in the Bitcoin community likes to admit.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Trouble with CloudFlare</title><url>https://blog.torproject.org/blog/trouble-cloudflare</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>scurvy</author><text>Maybe I&amp;#x27;m a cranky, old-school network operator, but this is a very cut and dry problem. Tor runs a network that is rife with abuse and fraud. Tor needs to clean up and police its network. If it doesn&amp;#x27;t, it will be put on blacklists and customers will take active measures to block traffic from it.&lt;p&gt;This is no different than a network or AS that is spammer friendly, botnet friendly, carder friendly, etc. All of those networks eventually end up on blacklists or Spamhaus lists and their efficacy goes down. Eventually, the network dies out and the criminals move somewhere else. Yes, it&amp;#x27;s a game of whack-a-mole, but it&amp;#x27;s proven to work well.&lt;p&gt;I know Tor doesn&amp;#x27;t want to be in the network regulation business, but they need to be if they want their product to thrive. Otherwise, good bye Tor.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnthonyMouse</author><text>The main point of Tor is that nobody knows where the traffic comes from. Realize you&amp;#x27;re asking them to break their own service.&lt;p&gt;Your premise seems to be that you can&amp;#x27;t be bothered to protect your networks so you want to put that responsibility on someone else. It&amp;#x27;s called intermediary liability and it&amp;#x27;s terrible because the intermediary has all the wrong incentives.&lt;p&gt;You demand that the intermediary eliminate malicious traffic but they suffer much less than individual users if they also eliminate non-malicious traffic, so they set up a system with a high rate of false positives and harm many honest people. YouTube does this with Content ID. Spam registries do this with innocent small mail servers. CloudFlare does this with Tor.&lt;p&gt;What you&amp;#x27;re doing is called externalizing costs. It&amp;#x27;s generally recognized as antisocial behavior. So if you&amp;#x27;re going to claim benefits to yourself at the expense of other people, at least recognize that you&amp;#x27;re doing it.</text></comment>