On Fri, Jun 6, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Marco Schuster marco@harddisk.is-a-geek.org wrote:
jayjg schrieb:
I appreciate why someone in China would want to use tor. Would any of that apply to someone in a Western democracy?
Living in a Western democracy doesn't necessarily mean that you can surf the web or use internet services freely, look at all those blocks for Bittorrent, the dozens of blocks for Nazi hosters, and especially the German court decision about YouPorn, which actually led to >2 million websites being invisible by Arcor customers; they can only be helped through proxys (though I don't think watching porn via proxys is good).
As has been pointed out, while porn sites may be blocked, Wikipedia rarely (if ever) is, so the analogy fails.
And please also do not forget that some people indeed care about their privacy - what many people unfortunately do not, and so freedom passes more and more away.
Wikipedia is an on-line encyclopedia, not an experiment in internet anonymity. If it were, then we would discard all checkuser logs immediately. We give editors a reasonable level of anonymity, a balance that provides the most net benefit to *Wikipedia*. Allowing TOR open proxies to edit (why TOR and no others, I wonder?) has an overall net dis-benefit to Wikipedia.