I agree that sockpuppets are a real problem, but they manage fine right now without going through Tor. There are quite a few ways to connect up using different IPs as it is now, so the real problem remains: the sockpuppeteers themselves.
Gabe On Mon, Jun 5, 2017 at 10:20 PM, Cristian Consonni <crist...@balist.es> wrote: > On 05/06/2017 19:43, David Gerard wrote: > > Editing may be a tricky one, particularly on en:wp, which has found > > Tor exit points to overwhelmingly be fountains of garbage, and > > automatically blocks them. > > On 05/06/2017 19:47, John wrote: > > enabling read access via Tor shouldn't be an issue, however editing > should > > not be allowed due to high volume of known abuse from that vector. > > On 05/06/2017 21:01, John wrote: > > Im not going to violate BEANS, but even allowing accounts to edit without > > further hurdles isn't going to work. Because of the anonymity that tor > > provides its fairly easy to cause widespread issues. When the vandals > start > > actually using tactics the flood gates of TOR will cause massive issues > > cross wiki that requires steward level intervention on a regular basis. > > Allow me to reiterate that I am not proposing any change to the current > policies regarding editing via Tor or other open proxies. Even with an > onion service, anonymous editing will still be blocked and registered > users will still need to apply for IP block exemption before being able > to edit. > > I have read several discussions on the topic (going back to 2006) and > what I have understood from those is that the biggest issue with editing > via Tor is sockpuppeting. Vandals and spammer could be handled (and > blocked), sockpuppets would be much harder to identify. The problem is > hard because it solving it requires to have a way to identify that two > accounts with different IPs are related to the same real person without > at the same time destroying the anonymity provided by Tor. There has > been research on the topic (see, for example, Nymble[1]) but at the very > least it would require some additional technical setup and testing. > > With this proposal I am not trying to solve that problem. > > I am just pointing out that: > 1. having an onion service would increase the privacy of our readers and > the (very few) people who are already allowed to edit via Tor. > 2. is harder to block access to an onion service than to wikipedia.org > (you basically need to block all accesses to Tor, but there are ways to > circumvent that, too[2]). > 3. supporting privacy-enhancing technology is good and people may need > it or maybe they will start using Tor more. > > As it stands now, the biggest impact of this project (if it is > successful) would be on operations and analytics. > > Cristian > > [1]: https://cgi.soic.indiana.edu/~kapadia/nymble/overview.php > [2]: https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports > > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/ > wiki/Wikimedia-l > New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
