RE: ietf.org unaccessible for Tor users

["Tony Hain" <[e-mail]>]

Michael StJohns wrote:
> On 3/16/2016 3:47 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
> > As is the nature of a service used by people who need to stay
> > anonymous for their own safety,
> 
> There's the set of TOR users, and there's the subset of TOR users that need
> to have the property of "anonymity for safety",  and then there's the set of
> people who need/want access to the IETF.
> 
> Could you provide an educated guess on the size of the intersection of
> those last two sets?   1?  10s? 100s? 1000s?  More?   I'm trying to
> understand the amount of hyperbole being slung about.
> 
> Finally, are there any other methods  besides Tor you can think of that
> would give "anonymity for safety" while still providing access to the IETF
> data? (Hint: asking a friend to photocopy paper or send you a usb stick....
> or...)

I don't have any answer to your question, but a belief that it could grow and shift over time as governments change. Nobody has addressed the question from Antonio Prado about setting up ietf.onion. I have never setup or used Tor, so I may be off base, but it would appear that the IETF could run a Tor router with a bandwidth-throttled exit policy that blocks all addresses except a mirror pointed to by the ietf.onion name. Basically a public hidden service.

Attackers could dos the throttle, but other than that, it would appear to remove the need for the worse-than-useless captcha while not opening up the IETF to abuse of the relay, and solve the access problem in the subject line. 

Tony