Another idea for a potential technical solution, this one provided
by the user Mirimir on the Tor mailing list. I thought this was
actually a pretty good idea.
Wikimedia could authenticate users with GnuPG keys. As
part of the
process of creating a new account, Wikimedia could randomly specify the
key ID (or even a longer piece of the fingerprint) of the key that the
user needs to generate. Generating the key would require arbitrarily
great effort, but would impose negligible cost on Wikimedia or users
during subsequent use. Although there's nothing special about such GnuPG
keys as proof of work, they're more generally useful.
As a proof of work I think it works out pretty well. The cost of creating
a key with a given fingerprint is non-trivial, but low enough that
someone wishing to create an account to edit might well go through with
it if they knew it would only be a one-time thing.
This doesn't completely eliminate the issue of socks, but honestly if we
make the key generation time reasonably long, it would probably deter
most socks as they might as well just drive to the nearest Starbucks.
Someone else on the Tor mailing list suggested that we basically relax
IPBE, which while not on topic for this list, I thought I'd mention
just because it has been mentioned. They actually basically
described our current system, except with the getting the IPBE stage
a lot easier.
The following was also pointed out to me:
[I]t's also trivial to evade using proxies, with
or without Tor.
Blocking Tor (or even all known proxies) only stops the clueless.
Anyone serious about evading a block could just use a private proxy
on AWS (via Tor). [snip] The bottom line is that blocking Tor harms
numerous innocent users, and by no means excludes seriously malicious
users.
I did respond to this to explain our concerns, which is what netted
the GPG idea. Does anyone see any glaringly obvious problems with
requiring an easily blockable and difficult to create proof of work
to edit via Tor?
Thank you,
Derric Atzrott