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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Tor users may soon have less to cry over, as CloudFlare's CEO is considering whitelists or other measures to better allow Tor access [theregister.co.uk] to websites without buggy CAPTCHA completion issues:

CloudFlare's CEO, Matthew Prince, told The Register that he would love to create a no-more-tears system allowing the network's legitimate users to access websites without being hit by buggy Turing tests, while also protecting his customers' sites from abuse. [...] While definitive figures on the degree to which the network is used abusively are unavailable, its supporters have complained that CloudFlare – which provides CDN and/or DNS services for over a million websites – has allowed those customers to implement CAPTCHAs which are purposefully designed to hamper Tor users' anonymous access to the web.

[...] Prince told The Register: "You have to acknowledge the complaints that Tor users have. It's made browsing the internet much more difficult for Tor users, and we hate that." The CEO is not alone in hating it. A bug tracker ticket opened yesterday by one of the Tor project's most well-known evangelists, Jacob Appelbaum, alleged [torproject.org] that companies such as CloudFlare "are effectively now Global Active Adversaries." CloudFlare, according to Appelbaum, "actively make it nearly impossible to browse to certain websites, they collude with larger surveillance companies (like Google), their CAPTCHAs are awful, they block members of our community on social media rather than engaging with them and frankly, they run untrusted code in millions of browsers on the web for questionable security gains."

[...] "About a month ago, I blacklisted every single IP address that was used in the CloudFlare office network, so our own team had to pass the CAPTCHAs too, so we had to feel the same pain, and it is a pain in the ass," added Prince. There have been bugs in the CAPTCHA system too, Prince added, forcing Tor users to have to pass the CAPTCHA more than once per site. "We just see a tonne of abuse coming from those IP addresses," said Prince, "and our system says it's statistically probable that this is abusive." CloudFlare is working on making things easier, however. The CEO told us that, "for first time, we're allowing our customers to apply their own rules to Tor exit nodes." The company will soon allow customers to whitelist Tor exit nodes. "What I worry about," said Prince, "was that I could not think of a philosophically justifiable reason to allow the whitelisting Tor exit nodes and not the blacklising of Tor exit nodes. We are just allowing customers to whitelist them, but I think a majority of site owners would rather blacklist them."

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