Re: [WikiEN-l] Blocking of Tor exit nodes

On 0, Slim Virgin <slimvirgin(a)gmail.com> scribbled: A perfectly legitimate question! After all, we all know that if you are innocent and have nothing to hide, there is no need for anonymity or privacy or any other silly things like that. Seriously though, the Chinese government is not the sole power which would like to control and censor Internet traffic. What if you're a Saudi or a Bahraini (it was Bahrain that was blocked by an administrator a while ago, right?) and you'd like to contribute? Or what if you are a US student and your school filters Internet access? That sort of thing. Or perhaps someone is merely trying to set up a secure computer, which global use of Tor is part of? (It's not that hard - set $http_proxy and you've covered a lot of applications right there.) Security is an obviously desirable good, and such a person may even have a legal or fiduciary good. Or perhaps our hypothetical person needs services like Tor for an entirely *other* reason unrelated to Wikipedia - blocking Tor forces them to compromise their setup, which can be a serious issue; if crypotography has taught us anything, it is that even the most trivial of things can leak enough information to break an otherwise flawless security system - witness sidechannel attacks. Perhaps one is untrusting of one's own government. With some handy tools like traceroute or ping, you can easily find suspicious hosts handling your Internet traffic. The world is too vast and varied for something as valuable as anonymity to be useful to only a small subset for a few purposes. Would you have guessed the Navy's original stated purpose for sponsoring the development of Tor was to protect its intelligence analysts? -- Gwern Inquiring minds want to know.