Frequently Asked Questions

The short answer is that fraudsters and thieves wrecked it for you.

While we support the notion of Tor on an ideological level, our real-world experience with Tor has consisted of extensive problems with Tor-sourced hacking attempts and an unsustainable level of Tor-sourced credit card fraud. We also encountered relentless exploitation by spammers and phishers using Tor to create throwaway accounts. (Sign up, create site, send spam, get caught, sign up, create site, send spam, get caught, sign up...)

For that reason, we do not allow you to access our secure members site via the Tor network unless you already have a membership and a funded personal bandwidth account and you explicitly request that it be allowed via our secure support request system. (All of which must be done without using the Tor network.) We choose not to allow it automatically so we can filter approvals based on the common sense of a real person, and to protect members who don't use Tor from Tor-based brute force attacks on their password.

We understand that it isn't the existence of the Tor network that makes these things possible, but it does make them easy, and when virtually all of the traffic from a certain source is malevolent, blocking that source can be the only option. Forcing people off of Tor at least long enough to confirm their membership and make an initial deposit may not be the ideal solution, but it's hard to argue with results.

If you know of a reliable way for us to distinguish a handful of good people amidst a throng of would-be criminals in an environment that's raison d'être is to make distinguishing people impossible, please let us know. So far, making sure we already have a relationship with the good people is the best we've come up with.

Completely separate from that, we also have concerns about reports of unscrupulous Tor exit node operators diverting SSL connections. We don't know if this is true, but I have personally experienced a case where using a particular exit node led to SSL certificate mismatches when accessing a site where I knew no such mismatch existed. You should think carefully about passing any secure information through the Tor network.

Our system used to block accesses from you if you were merely running a Tor transit node (aka a Tor relay), as opposed to using the Tor network to access us, or running a Tor exit node yourself. We believe we have adjusted our system such that merely running a Tor transit node will not cause you to be blocked. If you run a Tor transit node and you're blocked, please contact us.

If you are running a Tor exit node, you'll have to cut back to relay-only, and do so long enough for the change to be picked up, before you can sign up.