Rob Church wrote:
Let's stop talking about global blocking/permissions/etc. until single sign-on is complete. Then we can bolt things onto it. Without centralised user identification and authentication, we can do absolute Jack about global blocks.
Preferably let's not. There's all sorts of nice things we can do easily when we have single signon, but I'm not going to be holding my breath until it happens.
We're not talking about blocking user accounts globally, which indeed would depends on single signon. What is being proposed here is a centralized list of IP addresses of open proxies that Wikimedia projects can choose to block automatically.
In fact, we effectively already have that ability, in the form of the SORBS DNSBL code. It's just that it was turned off, since it was using a third-party list and we found that this didn't work too well. All we'd have to do to make it work again is set up our own private DNSBL and an admin interface for it.
Of course, there may be other, even easier ways to do this. I'm just saying that single signon is only tangentially related to all this.