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Ah thanks, I understand.

Still, you have to admit it kind of defeats the whole purpose of Tor if a user must use their real IP and/or give up their mobile phone number in order to use it. I agree with the restrictions, but it kind of makes me wonder why a legitimate Tor user would bother to use Gmail in this case.




It means you can log in without that provider knowing where you physically are. Useful for people in, say, Pakistan who might otherwise get "trial by metadata and punishment by Reaper drone".

But yes it's a very specialised use case. Most people won't care. Fully anonymous accounts will require something like Bitcoin proof of sacrifice or multi jurisdictional identity escrow. But the problem for those is that there's far more demand from abusive users than legitimate users, so it's hard to make a business case for providing such support.


I'm guessing the spammers generated millions of dormant accounts using TOR or a public hotspot/cantenna before Google implemented this. But I'm also guessing that el goog has an automated system to notice the patterns.

Ranting, but to this day, I still can't use google search reliably over TOR, meanwhile the spammers and adversarial people who scour Google's results for whatever purpose have almost certainly hacked the captcha, otherwise they would stop their grokking of the SERPs and rethink their retrieval methods, like get a channel bank of dial up modems, redialing once they get to a captcha. On certain TOR exits there is no captcha, so I assume they're probably new nodes or light traffic nodes. The captcha block page even says this: your computer is sending us a lot of queries. Here's one such unblocked node. It's in the ukraine, ~10MBPS, uptime of 31 days. It's about middle of the road in terms of bandwidth and has a somewhat short uptime. https://atlas.torproject.org/#details/31D01A8CD3799E0CB6A56D...

In my spare time, I run an exit node, but what I'm really doing is using my switches mirror port into my WAN connection to capture 100% of all TOR traffic for SEO purposes, and to find what and how people are hacking, etc....

It's ironic that google fights for the right to index everyone's content [see germany news et al] but the reverse? Oh no, no way! The SEOs will figure out our secret sauce and use Google to steal the best ranking content. And yes, I realize Google's guidelines are for the good of the web, I'm just ranting.


It defeats the purpose of hiding your identity from the endpoint, but that is not the only use-case for Tor. Some people live in places where connecting to Facebook is blocked or where doing so places them in danger, it is this group that is being served here.




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