On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 1:38 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
End of the day, though, absent blocking problematic IP addresses and ranges (which really can't be done unless the person blocking actually knows the IP address or range), the socks and spammers just keep coming. This problem isn't unique to WMF projects, and I don't believe anyone has come up with a solution that allows open/unregistered editing without also using IP information for blocking or limiting access.
I'm not arguing for open editing from Tor. I do think it would be nice if global exemptions could in fact be obtained reasonably easily be emailing stewards@wikimedia.org. While it's true that such requests could be misused, the following are also true:
- We regulate the influx of requests and the exemptions we grant. This means that we can use wait periods, interview questions, and other mechanisms to avoid it turning into a free-for-all. This is effectively the same mechanism riseup.net uses to grant anonymous email addresses.
- We know all the accounts that we have granted global exemptions to and therefore can investigate behavior _across the group_ of Tor users fairly easily, or even subsets of that group such as exemptions granted in a certain time window, by a certain user, etc.
It would allow a motivated person to reset their identity and go undetected provided they avoid the kind of articles and behaviors they got in trouble over in the first place. It's not clear to me that the consequences would be particularly severe or unmanageable beyond that.
Erik