
Verizon AS701 blocking Tor consensus server tor26 (86.59.21.38) - neelc
https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/2018-May/015218.html
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lsiebert
I don't believe Verizon would "discourage" Tor. It would either block it
completely, or continue to allow it.

The tiny percentage of Tor users don't concern Verizon. The miniscule loss of
advertising revenue isn't as big of an issue as the bad publicity that messing
with TOR would get them from media.

VPN users might be a thing they get concerned about, at some point, but I'd
expect them to come out with a VPN service if that was the case.

So I expect this will be traced to some kind of incompetence or error, not a
deliberate effort.

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djsumdog
Hanlon's razor

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gricardo99
Grey’s law [1]:

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice”

1-
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)

~~~
MikeTaylor
This should be Elsevier's corporate motto.

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ryanlol
Pfft. This was almost certainly blocked because someone thought it was a
malware C&C.

The indicator lists released by DHS and various snake oil peddlers regularly
contain IP addresses like this because they observed malware samples
connecting to the IP.

This isn't a new thing and has precisely nothing to do with net neutrality,
you could probably get this fixed in a couple of hours with a NANOG post.

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kodablah
> This isn't a new thing and has precisely nothing to do with net neutrality

Wouldn't a net neutrality proponent say that blocking traffic to/from an IP is
non-neutral regardless of reason?

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kelnage
I hope most net neutrality proponents would not say that it implies that all
providers must allow _all_ traffic through their network, regardless of
whether it is malicious or not. If they do believe that then it turns out I’m
against net neutrality.

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kodablah
> malicious

Careful, that's a subjective term. Not that I disagree w/ ISPs protecting
their own networks, but we often can't have it both ways unless it's more
clear what malicious means. Tor traffic can appear malicious as was probably
the case here.

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kelnage
Of course it is - unless we’re going by the relevant RFC, in which case we can
simply define it as traffic with the evil bit set ;) But net neutrality is, in
its essence, a subjective term. At the end of the day, it would be down to the
courts as the final arbiters of what is malicious or not, should it come to
that.

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schoen
Hmmmm, maybe ask on NANOG or something?

Unfortunately there's apparently no AS701 looking glass.

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dogecoinbase
Yeah, getting a contact via NANOG or Outages is the right venue for this.
There are a lot of automated/low-level paths to these kinds of blockages that
have nothing to do with elaborate hypothesized malice (of course, once that
has been eliminated, then you can start hypothesizing all you like).

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floatingatoll
Antispam responses are one such automated path.

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KerrickStaley
For what it's worth, I can ping 86.59.21.38 when tethered on my Verizon phone.

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acct1771
Via Tor?

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chriscappuccio
Without return traceroutes from tor26 this guy can't prove his claim at all.
No proof that the problem is even within 701.

