this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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Public resource but access restricted and exclusive

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This community tracks restricted access resources (generally websites) that are supposed to serve taxpayers and the general public, but they fail in that duty by imposing arbitrary restrictions on access. This is where we document these cases.

Most often, it is the Tor community who is marginalised by incompetantly implemented infosystems. This community will be mostly littered with references to tor-hostile public resources to a fatiquing extent, but this is expected. It is not necessarily limited to Tor. Any demographic of people who are refused service would have a relevant story here. E.g. someone traveling outside their country and being denied access to a homeland website on the basis of presumed IP geolocation.

This is very closely related to the [email protected] community. But there are some nuanced differences. Not all fiefdoms are necessarily always restricted access. E.g. some rare Facebook pages are reachable to non-FB users.

And not all manifestations of restricted access entail a fiefdom. E.g. it’s increasingly common for a gov website to block Tor visitors at the firewall without involving a digital fiefdom.

Cases of Cloudflare, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like can be crossposted in many situations. They are a fiefdom walled garden and also commonly configured to restrict access. IDK.. use your best judgement. Might suffice to just post in [email protected] in those cases.

Also related: [email protected]

Scope and rules:

What is not relevant here:

This community is focused on tax-funded government programs and services like public education, social services, voter reg, courts, legal statutes, etc. NGOs and non-profits may exist for the pubic benefit, but if they are not funded by force (taxation) then they are not really relevant here.

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It’s one of the ugliest most undignified forms of service refusal. They just simply drop packets from Tor. Not even enough courtesy to send a 403 forbidden. So visitors are left guessing whether the website is down, slow, or giving deliberate mistreatment. People then have to try different browsers with different timeout thresholds to investigate.

There is no apparent mirror or alternative site hosting Florida statutes. Archive.org has a cache of some laws but FL state gets zero credit for that.

(update) in fact there are two state sites for legal statutes and both block tor:

I would love it if someone would successfully argue in court “sorry I broke that law but I could not inform myself of the law because every time I tried to reach the state’s website for statutes it just timed out” -- and get away with it.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm surprised they even know Tor exists. I'm not familiar enough with Tor, but is it possible the website is just configured badly and breaks some assumptions Tor relies on?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

It’s possible that it’s an accident, but unlikely IMO. The accidental case is overload and timing fragility. Tor introduces a delay, so if a server already has a poor response time and the user’s browser has a short timeout tolerance, then it’s a recipe for a timeout. Firefox does better than Chromium on this (default configs). But I tried both browsers. At the state level I think they made a concious decision to drop packets.

It’s also possible that they are not blocking all of Tor but just the exit node I happened to use. I did not exhaustively try other nodes but I was blocked two different days (thus likely two different nodes). In any case, this forum should help sort it out. Anyone can chime in with other demographics who are blocked, or tor users that are not blocked.

(edit) ah, forgot to mention: www.flsenate.gov also drops Tor packets.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

This seems like two odd decisions that I'd really like to know the thought process behind. Why block Tor to begin with, and why specifically packet loss? It makes me wonder if it's some kind of odd attempt at a honeypot, though that seems unlikely. Thus interesting to know about. Thanks for posting.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

oh neat, I'm blocked on mullvad

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well, that’s notable. I’ve not installed mullvad so I can’t test it.. but that’s the sort of thing that could be posted to this forum. It seems odd that a VPN would be blocked by the USDA but not Tor.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Add a proxy to your route :p

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Run a wireguard server at home. Use tor to connect to it from home. Problem solved.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So you go trough tor just to loop back and connect to the endpoint from your home?

That's as anonymous as just.. not using tor

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Well, "over your head meme" :p