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Tor Project Accuses CloudFlare of Mass Surveillance, Sabotaging Traffic (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Tensions are rising between Tor Project administrators and CloudFlare, a CDN and DDoS mitigation service that's apparently making the life of Tor users a living hell. Tor administrators are saying that CloudFlare is making Tor users enter CAPTCHAs multiple times, tracking their Web sessions, and sharing data with other companies. Additionally, a study by some UK and US researchers found that are 1.3 million websites blocking access to Tor users, 3.67% being Alexa Top 1000 sites.
>> making the life of Tor users a living hell: enter CAPTCHAs multiple times, tracking their Web sessions, and sharing data with other companies
Are you sure they're not just anonymous SlashDot users?
In any case, you have an odd definition of a "living hell" even from a first-world perspective.
I've been using Cloudflare for a few years, and they've helped me handle traffic and abuse from my one-server site and have never been a problem or expensive. Nor have they been malicious. I also have some Open Source projects like FreeDV.org going through Cloudflare.
One of the things they do is protect me from web attacks. It's an unfortunate fact that Tor really is used for web attacks.
Obviously, if there is a problem with their capcha, they need to fix it. I think it's perfectly fair for someone who is approaching the site through a known attack vector to have to pass a capcha once.
Regarding cookies, you're always going to get one on my site, whether you are using Tor or not, to support logins. HTTP isn't session-based and you need cookies to simulate sessions, so that you can have logins and dispense privileges where appropriate. One would expect that Tor users understand how to deal with cookies, and with less civil attempts to nail down their identity.
Bruce Perens.