Tor can be used for good and for bad. It's the very same problem that Cory Doctorow talks about in his lectures about the War on General Purpose Computing, and it's not an easy problem to solve.<p>I'm an admin on a social/gaming site (a MUD with appendant forum, blogs, and other community elements), and we have had to make a few decisions about Tor in the last couple of years.<p>Some background: the site is quite old, and we have historically encouraged users to sign up without needing to provide a unique ID such as email address. They <i>can</i> provide one, but don't have to. In the last few years we have had the problem of occasional griefers log on and cause whatever social havoc they can.<p>Now, my personal feelings about Tor are generally quite positive, and I like the freedoms it provides people who are otherwise restricted by their ISPs or governments from accessing legitimate resources. Like many others have said, Tor is a tool that, while it can be used to do illegal things, is also used to provide a very useful service to people who need it to get on with things you and I take for granted.<p>Now, back to our griefers: We have a number of banning mechanisms based on IP or domain, and they tend to be successful because griefers usually get bored when they can't access the site for a couple of hours. However, because a tiny minority of griefers are more persistent, more technically adept, and figured they could use Tor to damage our community, we did a little bit of analysis and found that few if any legitimate users of our site came from Tor exit points, and we chose to block them. The alternative was to require a unique identity during the sign-up process, and frankly we wanted as few hurdles as possible to new users (anyone who knows the MUD community knows that it's in decline, and low-friction signups are pretty desirable). So we blacklist Tor exit points from our signup process.
The unfortunate fact is that some Tor users do bad things with the fantastic tool at their disposal, and end up spoiling it for the legitimate (and extremely valuable) use cases that make it such an amazing tool. Yet its very anonymity means that there is no easy way to allow one set of uses while disallowing others. This is a hard problem, and one I'm not smart enough to solve.
I have a hard time blaming them for this. They're a budget provider, so any extra cost handling subpoenas and legal documents (which, let's not kid ourselves, is going to happen 100x more on a Tor node than on the majority of their other customers) quite possibly means a loss for them on a server.
The relevant French: "depuis quelques mois, nous avons eu
plusieurs affaires juridiques lié à l'utilisation
de plusieurs réseaux TOR dans le cas de la pedo
et on va désormais l'interdire au même titre que
tous les systèmes d'anonymisation."<p>My (amateur) translation, cleaning up Google translate (which doesn't recognize Tor as a proper name): "For several months, we've had many legal matters related to the use of TOR networks in pedo cases, and from now on, it is forbidden along with all systems of anonymization."<p>Doesn't sound like they want any part of it.
"Pour des raisons de sécurité, l’ensemble des services IRC (à titre non-exhaustif : bots, proxy, bouncer,
etc.), services de navigation anonyme (généralement appelés proxy), nœuds TOR, ne sont pas autorisés
sur le réseau OVH sauf autorisation écrite d’OVH. OVH se réserve le droit de suspendre tout serveur sur
lequel ces éléments seraient utilisés sans autorisation préalable d’OVH."<p>It looks like anything looking like a proxy is forbidden now. Including tor nodes :/
OVH used to be one of the top host provider.
Last year they removed the unmetered bandwidth and now TOR, VPN too ? (it's unclear to me).
What's next ? no HTTPS, European traffic only ?
seriously this sadden me, lucky for us Online.net is a good challenger.
They've not been Tor friendly for a while - and indeed have forbidden Tor for some time, at least according to Tors Good Bad ISPs wiki page - <a href="https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISPs#France1" rel="nofollow">https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/GoodBadISP...</a>
My French is not good enough to see if this is only for exit nodes, or also for internal relays?<p>Running Tor relays is one of the reasons I use their servers...
Google-translated part from <a href="http://www.ovh.com/fr/support/documents_legaux/Conditions_particulieres_location_serveur_dedie_2013.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ovh.com/fr/support/documents_legaux/Conditions_pa...</a>:<p>7.4 For security reasons, all IRC services (for non-exhaustive: bots, proxy, bouncer, etc..), anonymous browsing services (usually called proxies), TOR nodes, are not allowed on the OVH network unless written consent of OVH. OVH reserves the right to suspend any server which these elements are used without prior permission of OVH.
Here's a related link just 5 days ago.<p>Server host OVH warns of 'multi-stage' hacking attack.
<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/23/top_server_host_ovh_warns_of_multistage_hacking_attack/" rel="nofollow">http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/23/top_server_host_ovh_...</a>