Am 17.01.2014 20:08, schrieb Marc A. Pelletier: There are (may be) solutions for this and related issues, see: (book) Peter Wayner "Disappearing Cryptography" Third edition pages 225-227, 2009. ISBN 978-0-12-374479-1 Chapter 10.7.3 "Stopping Bad user": "bad users of the onion routing network can ruin the reputation of other users. The Wikipedia, for instance, often blocks TOR exit nodes complete because some people have used the network to hide their identities while defacing the wiki's entries..." In the further passages Peter Wayner explains a "one straight-forward solution is to use some form of certificates with a *blind signature*, a technique that borrows from some of the early solutions for building anonymous digital cash" (A typical example with "Alice" follows - must read this). and http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2009.38 (article) Tsang, P.P.; Kapadia, A.; Cornelius, C.; Smith, S.W., "Nymble: Blocking Misbehaving Users in Anonymizing Networks." IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, vol.8, no.2, pp.256-269, March-April 2011. I mentioned both in https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=59146 .

On 17 January 2014 14:08, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote: I agree with Marc on this, and further would say that the "reason" given by Erik in his application for IPBE is pretty much a red flag that a user is going to be editing in a controversial and non-neutral manner. It's also a red flag that the user's probably been blocked for doing it before, and thinks this will be a workaround that will prevent him/her from being blocked this time. Risker/Anne

On 17 January 2014 16:26, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: Well, Erik, the vast majority of socks are blocked without checkuser evidence, and always have been, on all projects; the evidence is often in the edits, and doesn't need any privacy-invading tools to confirm. I get the notion of reducing or eliminating the public visibility of IP addresses and am quite supportive of it; IPv6 addresses in particular can often disclose far too much personal information. 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. Risker

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 6:33 PM, Erik Moeller <erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: People get banned from Wikimedia projects for off-wiki conduct too that has nothing to do with Wikimedia projects.

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 12:12 PM, Jan Zerebecki <jan.wikimedia(a)zerebecki.de>wrote;wrote: Your scenario is based on the premise that Wikipedia vandals care enough about vandalizing Wikipedia that they would get in their car (assuming they're old enough to have a license), drive to the nearest Starbucks, vandalize Wikipedia, and then drive somewhere else when they are blocked. Most vandals don't put that much effort into it. I would argue that abusing free WiFi hotspots is actually harder than abusing Tor, because it involves physically moving from location to location, as opposed to pressing a button and resetting my identity. Keep in mind we are not trying to permanently block vandals, because that's impossible. We're just trying to make vandalism difficult enough so it is no longer worthwhile. *-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science

On 1 February 2014 09:12, Jan Zerebecki <jan.wikimedia(a)zerebecki.de> wrote: That doesn't always work. Many open access points like this are blocked such that it's not possible to create a new account, but it is possible to edit through an existing one. Libraries and schools are the primary example of this. To summarize: It is currently easier for someone to abuse without Tor The same is true of blocks. It is currently easier to vandalise when your IP is not blocked than when it is. Should we remove blocking altogether? No. Once you put in place measures to stop abuse through one avenue, people can do that same abuse through another avenue. That's not a reason not to attempt to stop the abuse. Aside from the fact that this is not always true (see my first point), it's simply because we got much more abuse from users Tor than we did from users of free wifi. And the abuse from Tor was much more critical, such as uploading illegal content, as opposed to the simple block evasion that we typically see from free wifi. In an ideal world, we wouldn't need to block Tor. Then again, in an ideal world, we wouldn't need blocks at all. Dan -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation

On 01/17/2014 04:26 PM, Erik Moeller wrote: Not necessarily. Abuse prevention requires, fundamentally, only one thing: being able to tell that edit X has been done by the same person as edit Y with N% probability. That's the fundamental decision done by administrators and checkusers when deciding whether to block a user or source of edits. User IP and UA is one of the datapoints that is used for that determination (both by checkusers and, indirectly, by administrators via autoblocks or range blocks); but any other method by which that determination can be made would serve just as well. That we are not currently able to satisfactorily find a method by which we can attribute online actions to an individual without (currently) placing some limits on their privacy does not mean we never will be able to -- or at least that we'll be able to tip the balance towards more privacy than less. It's a Hard Problem. Businesses tend to fix it by tying online identities to some physical (and finite) token of existence (like a Credit Card); something which we emphatically would never want to do because that vastly /reduces/ privacy. We don't care to know who someone *is*, just whether they are the same one as before. IMO, efforts should be directed towards that more fundamental goal; everything else will fall into place from there. -- Marc