[liberationtech] when you are using Tor, Twitter will blocked your acc

[Griffin Boyce]

Seth David Schoen wrote:
> It seems obviously crazy to me for Twitter to prevent people from
> accessing it over Tor, both in light of widespread censorship of 
> Twitter
> on different networks and in light of governments' attempts to find out
> where users of services are connecting from.

   Yes, agreed.  I have to wonder what the origin of this sudden policy 
is.  And, is it a policy directed at anonymous users?  Or is it just 
certain IPs being marked as malicious and blacklisted?

> On the other hand, if a service is viewing anomalous originating IP
> address as an indicator of compromise, then using Tor destroys that
> information source.  For example, if Twitter whitelists Tor exit nodes
> and says that connecting from them is never viewed as suspicious, then
> anybody who knows this and compromises a Twitter user's account can
> just use the stolen account over Tor and never get detected or blocked.

   Well a clearly this isn't a definitive "this user is not up to 
anything bad" setting, but rather they need a more holistic approach 
here.  Their policy here is very opaque.  But if the goal is to avoid 
automated activity (follow/unfollow/spam/messaging etc), then there are 
other approaches that could work just as well.

   Why not captcha these activities if the user comes from Tor or an 
identified proxy?  Is this a pain in the ass for users?  Yes.  Is it 
going to prevent them from expressing themselves anonymously online?  
No.

~Griffin