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[vegivamp]

(warning: geek talk ahead)

Since I changed jobs, some time ago, I no longer had access to IRC. Yesterday, I finally got around to installing a Tor client, and it works dripnificently. Suddenly, I reappeared on #eurofurs. Today, however, all five active irc.furnet.org servers claim that they don't like me because I'm coming from a Tor exit node, and could I please go fuck myself.

I just notice, however, that it intermittently does work for a few seconds, until the server seems to wake up and realize I'm coming through Tor.

Does anyone have a clue as to why
 a) it worked fine yesterday,
 b) furnet is so afraid of people they can't trace, and
 c) if there are other, more friendly servers where I could connect to #eurofurs ?

I suppose I could route the tor exit through a regular server of mine somewhere, but it annoys me no end that they won't accept tor exit nodes.

[Eisfuchs]

FurNet does not accept TOR exits, this is true. I think I was the one watching you connecting this mornig over and over again, obviously ignoring the message and trying to find a TOR node we don't know about. This is why it worked before, because nobody saw the connection and the automated scanner doesn't pick up every exit.

For the record: The message does not say, "go fuck yourself", it says:

"We don't allow TOR exit nodes to connect to FurNet. Please connect through your normal connection."

Please do NOT ignore these messages. We WILL terminate any TOR connection that went unnoticed by the scanners. We do not want anonymous connections because there has been a lot of abuse done using them in the past. If you want to connect to FurNet, please read the message in the disconnection notice and use your regular account. As an alternative we can offer a password protected web based IRC frontend.

We are not afraid of anonymous accounts, we simply don't want to put up with spam, trolls and furry haters abusing a well-meant service like TOR.

What annoys *me* to no end is people trying to circumvent restrictioins and ignoring the messages sent to them.

Yours,
Eisfuchs, FurNet administrator.

[Suran]

Sadly the scanner is a bit too eager and also blocks tor-exit-nodes that do not allow
anonymous connections to furnet. (The exit-policies are public and ment to be easily parsed
by computers. There are even existing DNS-BL that can be asked with an IP+Port -pair
to only list tor-exit-nodes that in fact allow connections ton that ip+port -pair.)

[vegivamp]

Well, problem fixed for now - thanks for the help, Eisfuchs, and again sorry for the connect spamming :-)

It's very unfortunate, though, that you have to block the entire anonymizing network because of a relative few individuals - especially since I get the impression that Germany, together with quite a large bit of the rest of the world, is slowly sliding towards thought police. Let's hope that we don't get to a point where Tor-like services are the only safe way for minorities to connect to each other.

I'm not sure how your Tor scanner works, but perhaps a solution would be to only allow authenticated connections and verified accounts from Tor exits ?

[Eisfuchs]

Suran, you remember the time when I asked you about how TOR works and how to detect TOR nodes etc.? Your answer was full of gibberish and half information I could use for nothing. We use the IP:Port scheme, actually. Our scanner currently checks, if a TOR node advertises itself as open for ports 6667 and 6697 (FurNet's IRC and SSL-IRC ports). That's all we have at the moment.

If you can provide more information in a way a human can understand and use, I am more than happy to push for a solution that allows TOR to be used in a responsible way.

Thanks!
Eisfuchs.

Edit: Typo

[Suran]

It already does?
cool.