Hello sirs. I've been in communication with a user who feels that my block of his IP address is inappropriate. E-mail correspondence follows.

---- On 3/21/06, Wwwwolf wrote:

Hello,

213.216.199.14 (Tuira-P1.suomi.net) is currently blocked, with the reasoning being that it's suspected to be an open proxy.

This is indeed a proxy (but not an open one - or at least it's not *supposed* to be, I think), used by my ISP (Oulun Puhelin Oy, a.k.a. Oulu Telephone Company, Oulu, Finland). The thing is, it's a transparent proxy that the ISP uses by default, and I'm not aware of any way for the users to disable it (aside of using any other port besides 80, of course).

The proxy has been blocked a few times before on fi.wikipedia for vandalism. The host name suggests it's a proxy for the users of Tuira region in Oulu, and since I'm not that close to Tuira, I take an educated guess it handles a huge chunk of the northern Oulu (remember, I'm not really that familiar with the ISP's inner working, just guesses). I'd *hate* to drag every luser in this big neighborhood out of their homes and ask them nicely, with a baseball bat, if they have been adding crap to WP. There *has* to be a nicer solution to this than that, right?

There's an unrepentent vandal in the neighborhood. What a scary thought. Maybe I should move to Siberia. Meanwhile, maybe I need to edit from the university =(

---- On 3/22/06, freakofnurture wrote:

If what you said was true, I would not have been able to perform this edit through it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Sandbox&diff=prev&am...

Sorry, your IP is a Tor proxy.

---- On 3/22/06, Wwwwolf wrote:

All right, so my guess is there's some Bloody Idiot in the neighborhood who runs a Tor node, 80/tcp traffic comes out of that host and gets intercepted and forwarded by the ISP's proxy (that *every* customer is forced to use, I remind you again).

In other words, the blocked IP is, in my educated guess, *not* the Tor node. It just unwittingly hides a Tor node behind it.

So what exactly are we going to do here? Call the ISP (who are a Phone Company, I remind you again) and ask them to remind people that running Tor is very, very stupid because it makes rest of the customers unable to edit Wikipedia? Or ask them to take fascist measures to make the people not to run Tor exit points from home? Or move to Siberia; goodbye, cruel world?

I'm not questioning the wisdom of blocking the thing if Tor traffic really goes through here; all I'm saying this causes a lot of collateral damage. And what am I supposed to do now? Look like a Chinese dissident and use Privoxy, the most incomprehensible program devised by mankind since the advent of Sendmail? I would rather not try to specifically avoid IP bans even if I'm supposedly the innocent party.

---- On 3/22/06, Wwwwolf wrote:

Still on the open proxy issue:

It seems that the proxy does provide a valid X-Forwarded-For header. I made a small script on my web host that spits out the HTTP remote address and X-Forwarded-For header, and got 213.216.199.14 (Tuira-P1.suomi.net) and 82.128.217.58 (addr-82-128-217-58.suomi.net) respectively, latter of which appears to be my correct IP.

Now please don't tell me Mediawiki can't block based on X-Forwarded-For. This is the year 2006, after all... =)

---- [end of correspondence] ----

So, I'm wondering whether this is a shaggy dog story, or blatant trolling, or possibly an alibi with plausible technical merit. I was about to post this to [[WP:BJAODN]], but a fellow administrator referred me to this list. All I know is... if *I* was able to make a sandbox edit of "Tor proxy ~~~~" using his IP, anybody could just as easily the IP for abusive purposes. Suffice it to say I don't know what to tell the guy.

--freakofnurture -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Tor-and-%22X-Forwarded-For%22-t1325932.html#a3538731 Sent from the Wikipedia Developers forum at Nabble.com.