Recent evolution of a story on Hacker News:<p>An incorrect story is posted, and quickly rises up the homepage.<p>Hacker News commenters wave their torches and pitchforks.<p>Somewhere between a couple hours and a couple days later, a correction is posted.<p>The correction never attracts the same amount of attention, and multiple people inevitably post comments saying something to the effect of 'just because <i>this</i> time proved to be factually inaccurate doesn't mean our rage isn't justified, since this could conceivably happen in the future.'
Whether or not FB is deliberately blocking Tor <i>now</i>, how out-of-line would it be for them to eventually block it in the future?<p>It doesn't seem in their best interest as a company to allow Tor connections...but other than that, what <i>ethical obligations</i> do they have to allow anonymous connections? FB already has a policy more-or-less mandating real identities...so for them, this is kind of a non-issue, right? By using FB, you're already identifying yourself and agreeing to implicitly under the TOS.<p>So does that mean activists are screwed? Well...I'm interested in the use-cases for activists using FB...I mean, if you're in a situation where you fear the authorities tracking you down...then you hopefully have better sense than to conduct business under your social identity. If you're managing a FB account from a fake identity and fear the authorities tracking your IP...then maybe do your work from a public wifi? Facebook isn't your biggest enemy here...the enemy is, ostensibly, the government...and the secondary enemy is you (or your collaborators) attracting attention to yourself inadvertently, whether you're using Tor or not.<p>I guess the tl:dr of my question is: if you must conduct sensitive work, why do it on Facebook, a network that is committed to <i>sharing things in public?</i>
It worries me that Facebook is not <i>deliberately</i> blocking Tor.<p>Suppose an oppressive regime wants to block its people from anonymously accessing a service: Facebook, Google+, Twitter, etc. They have traditionally been locked in an arms race of sorts with Tor developers: the regime will identify Tor relays and filter connections to them; Tor developers step up with bridges. The regime uses DPI to attempt to identify Tor connections, and Tor developers put out Obfsproxy. And so on, and so on.<p>Now it's clear to everybody that their best option is not to prevent outbound connections to Tor, it's to prevent inbound connections <i>from</i> Tor on the services they don't want their people to use anonymously. All they have to do is ensure they inflict maximum abuse on the targeted service from Tor, and in this way give that service the incentive to cut off the users most in need.<p>I'm not suggesting abuse on the Tor network comes largely from intentional government 'territory denial'. However, it's frightening that there is such an easy way for them to deny the services which are in practice essential to the universal free exercise of speech on the Web.
This is also reason why most of the time you cannot use online bank systems through Tor: banks block big chunk of Tor exit nodes as malicious traffic sources (for legimate reason, I believe).
Tor has an unfortunately seedy underside, where data scrapers and online scammers (two of several use cases that I know of) use the service to obfuscate their actions and avoid crackdown. "That's why we can't have nice things."<p>For those who are still somewhat paranoid, consider getting paid proxies for a much more reliable service while still maintaining IP anonymity.
Honestly, who cares if Facebook isn't blocking Tor traffic? They are only interested in mining your personal information to sell to advertisers; they don't care how you get to their service. In addition, Facebook will still ban you if you use pseudonym.