Tor is the solution to getting hellbanned at HN.<p>That is "censorship", no?<p>Tor is also the solution to your Twitter API woes. Like it or not. I'm sure many SEO people use it to get around Google's restrictions. These are not necessarily uses that infringe anyone's IP. Twitter is UGC. And Google caches the entire web, indiscriminantly.<p>Tor, like the 'net itself, is controversial. It can be used for bad things. It can also be used for good things. It could be used to break criminal laws, or to enable copyright infringment. It could be used to violate TOS that may or may not be enforceable in civil court. Or it could be used just to evade idiosyncratic censorship by some webmaster that has no legal basis whatsoever. (This comment itself is being posted through Tor.) It is, however, any way you look at it, useful.<p>There may be an "intended purpose" for Tor. But as with almost all software, that means little. Users decide how they will use it. And that is unpredictable.<p>Did the folks at MIT, when they developed Tor, say to themselves, "You know, this will be used to commit crime"? Probably. But they also probably envisioned some other uses that were of undisputed benefit to society.<p>As someone else said, MIT is still behind Tor. Grep the source for the Tor client for IP numbers. You will find that some belong to MIT. My understanding is that Tor is controlled by a small group (maybe only one person) because like anything else that uses a network, there has to be a bootstrap, a "root" that hands out the initial addresses. And anyone that uses the Tor trusts that root. Somewhere there is/are a few people with a great responsibility on their hands: they make Tor possible, for better, or worse.<p>More people need to use Tor for non-criminal purposes. Using Tor as a workaround for censorship, whether it is on HN, or in some oppressed country is to be expected. If you are the censor, and you don't like it, ban Tor. It is not difficult.
HN does not ban Tor.<p>One of the great myths on the 'net is that an IP address equates to a machine or a customer account. False. It represents an interface, which is itself an ephemeral concept. Interfaces can be created, cloned or destroyed at the blink of an eye.<p>This may all be frightening or it may be exciting, it all depends on how you look at it. It shouldn't matter whether you are a good samaritan or a criminal. It is just technology. Abstract tools. A hammer can be used to build something or it can be used to destroy something. It has no moral sensibility on its own.<p>That's up to you, the user.<p>As a Tor user (I can't post to HN without it), it bothers me that others are using it for criminal purposes. But when I look at hammer, I see a tool for creation, not destruction. I think like a carpenter. What can we build?<p>The hammer has no consciousness of its own, any more than Tor does.