But Tor is an enormous source of abusive traffic and if I don't filter it, then that's harmful to site owners. I'm being forced to choose between the needs of people that I know, work with, and depend on financially, and the needs of people in countries with issues that are far outside my ability to resolve. It's not a hard decision.

between 2015 and ~2020, my home ISP was blessed with every recaptcha being 3 rounds of slow fade-in bullshit. I have also seen infuriating gaslighting of "please try again" after certainly correct solutions, as well as 5+ rounds followed by a notification that my network is entirely blocked.

I've developed a reflex to Ctrl+W upon seeing it, unless that is absolutely vital for me to get past it - which is exceedingly rare.

if I had a genie lamp, I'd waste one of my 3 wishes to do terrible things to the people responsible for that shit.

Tor users do not have any special properties over clear-net users besides low accountability for their IP space. There are other ways to acquire this type of setup that don't involve broadcasting a public list of known exit nodes as an act of good faith. Any sophisticated attacker will be able to easily get ahold of the IP space and bandwidth they need to do their work, whether it's through a botnet or simply because they operate out of some less-accountable country like China or Russia.

IP filtering: now you have two problems!

/s, obviously, I hope.

Blocking Tor isn't a security measure, it's a nuisance reduction measure.

You kid, but this is completely true Email is simply an incredibly flawed, outdated and broken system, especially when used without PGP. Phishing is a massive problem, and it has only continued to grow in scale because spam, uh... finds a way. At the same time, spam filters regularly create false positives, making email an unreliable transport (leading "oops, it got lost in my spam folder").

>Blocking Tor isn't a security measure, it's a nuisance reduction measure.

You should block all IP space, this will reduce nuisances by 100%. In fact, this will save you from having to consider any real security practices or do your job properly.

Tor's advocates in this thread keep trying to argue it from ideology, as though anybody's obligated to deal with Tor traffic on principle alone, and not one of them so far has tried to argue that Tor is not 90+% bots and garbage. Funny, that.

I have Tor installed, figured it would be worth adding my boring browsing to the mix sometimes, but since most sites I try to load block Tor exits, Tor browser now sits unused.

On the other hand, if I woke up tomorrow deciding to start a bot farm or whatever other malicious thing, or course I'd be interested in hiding through Tor and might try it again (don't worry, I won't wake up that way).

So even if a hypothetical 100% of global internet users really wanted to do all their browsing through Tor, they might all reach the same conclusion as me that too many sites are blocked and therefore leave Tor to mostly bad traffic. Of course it's nowhere near 100%, but hopefully you see my point that the sites blocking Tor IPs (and I absolutely appreciate why) can become a self-fulfilling prophecy - and I'm not sure how you'd get out of that loop?

https://www.linode.com/community/questions/22305/entire-ip-r...

Depends on what you imply under 'hard'.

As a IaaS provider I endured alk the hurdles about that and ten years later - I don't care, at least not until my outbound bill is bigger than usual.

Like some of the clients are on CentOS6, on a public facing machines.

What kind of abusive traffic is coming through Tor and why do they do it?

But the signup spam was a headache. I didn't want to just blackhole Tor traffic, and tried to reduce the abuse with other tools, including some custom stuff. The final straw was a customer's small business site that had a MailChimp or Constant Contact signup form. Those vendors want you to embed their code by default to render the form, so you have less control over the form itself. There were workarounds, but they all sucked.

Tor bots would sign up email addresses through this newsletter form, and then I'd have to go through and manually scrub them before newsletters went out, or the service would penalize my client for too many bounces/unsubscribes/complaints. Very nearly 100% of the abuse on that particular form came from Tor IPs.

I do not want to spend my limited time on this Earth manually sorting out bots from humans because of one particular network. Blackholing Tor made that problem disappear immediately.

VPNs are dime-a-dozen now, cheap VPSs are available from lots of vendors, there's Wireguard, there's ssh, a clever person could even set up Apache or nginx as a forward proxy with ssl from LetsEncrypt. Tor is well over 90% abusive traffic (https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/). This is a Tor problem, not a me problem. There are better alternatives available.

Solution: Require sign-ups by email, so the end account must actively send your mailserver a registration message. This also turns an open-loop control system into a closed loop control system, which is inherently easier to secure / keep safe.

It's also easy to send "from" an addresses that passes SPIF/DKIM but bounces inbound mail -- not sure what reason someone would have for this other than hurting the service reputation or acting as a DoS of sorts, but it can be done.

Proper DMARC configuration is table stakes to send e-mail, which makes that anything but trivial.

Then put the form behind your monopolistic internet gatekeeper. There's no reason for a GET to redirect to a sysiphean captcha treadmill.

> . Based on data across the CloudFlare network, 94% of requests that we see across the Tor network are per se malicious. That doesn’t mean they are visiting controversial content, but instead that they are automated requests designed to harm our customers. A large percentage of the comment spam, vulnerability scanning, ad click fraud, content scraping, and login scanning comes via the Tor network. To give you some sense, based on data from Project Honey Pot, 18% of global email spam, or approximately 6.5 trillion unwanted messages per year, begin with an automated bot harvesting email addresses via the Tor network.

Using tor hides your IP address from the website and makes switching exit nodes very straightforward, so you can run your account take over script in peace.

So yes, you can switch exits easily, but effectively your switching from one known bad IP to another bad IP.