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(USA) Department Of Government Efficiency (doge.gov) uses Cloudflare to block Tor (LOL, but sad)
(cyberplace.social)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/28580567
Love the irony and simultaneous foreshadowed embarrassment of Elon denying availability and service as a way to be more efficient.
The irony
Cloudflare enables web admins to be extremely bloated. Admins of Cloudflared websites have no incentive to produce lean or efficient websites because Cloudflare does the heavy lifting for free (but at the cost of reduced availability to marginalized communities like Tor, VPNs, CGNAT, etc). So they litter their website with images and take little care to choose lean file formats or appropriate resolutions. Cloudflare is the #1 cause of web inefficiency.
Cloudflare also pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs with reckless disregard which needlessly wastes resources and substantially increases traffic bloat -- all to attack bots (and by side-effect text-based users) who do not fetch images and thus are the most lean consumers of web content.
The embarrassment
This is a perfect foreshadowing of what we will see from this department. “Efficiency” will be achieved by killing off service and reducing availability. Certain demographics of people will lose service in the name of “efficiency”.
It’s worth noting that DOGE is not using Cloudflare’s default configuration. They have outright proactively blacklisted Tor IPs to ensure hard-and-fast fully denied service to that demographic of people. Perhaps their PR person would try to claim CAPTCHA avoidance is efficient :)
The other embarrassment is that they are using Cloudflare for just a single tiny image. They don’t even have enough competency to avoid CF in the normal state & switch it on demand at peak traffic moments.
The discussion
More chatter here.
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The main landing site for the FCC blocks Tor users with a 403. This means their contact page is also exclusive access, along with a number of otherwise pubilc access databases.
At least their consumer complaints site open to all, including those with a privacy complaint:
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It’s one of the ugliest most undignified forms of service refusal. They just simply drop packets from Tor. Not even enough courtesy to send a 403 forbidden. So visitors are left guessing whether the website is down, slow, or giving deliberate mistreatment. People then have to try different browsers with different timeout thresholds to investigate.
There is no apparent mirror or alternative site hosting Florida statutes. Archive.org has a cache of some laws but FL state gets zero credit for that.
(update) in fact there are two state sites for legal statutes and both block tor:
I would love it if someone would successfully argue in court “sorry I broke that law but I could not inform myself of the law because every time I tried to reach the state’s website for statutes it just timed out” -- and get away with it.
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(USA) IRS website blocks tor users
(lemmy.sdf.org)
Indeed the IRS website blocks Tor users from accessing tax information, as if tor users don’t need tax information. Important legal guidance exists on irs.gov, so it’s obviously an injustice to block people from becoming informed about their rights and obligations.
(edit)
What’s the fix? Would it be effective to make a FOIA request on paper so the IRS must send the info on paper via USPS? Or would that require compensation to offset their burden?
Public resource but access restricted and exclusive
46 readers
2 users here now
This community tracks restricted access resources (generally websites) that are supposed to serve taxpayers and the general public, but they fail in that duty by imposing arbitrary restrictions on access. This is where we document these cases.
Most often, it is the Tor community who is marginalised by incompetantly implemented infosystems. This community will be mostly littered with references to tor-hostile public resources to a fatiquing extent, but this is expected. It is not necessarily limited to Tor. Any demographic of people who are refused service would have a relevant story here. E.g. someone traveling outside their country and being denied access to a homeland website on the basis of presumed IP geolocation.
This is very closely related to the !digi_fiefdom_required@lemmy.sdf.org community. But there are some nuanced differences. Not all fiefdoms are necessarily always restricted access. E.g. some rare Facebook pages are reachable to non-FB users.
And not all manifestations of restricted access entail a fiefdom. E.g. it’s increasingly common for a gov website to block Tor visitors at the firewall without involving a digital fiefdom.
Cases of Cloudflare, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like can be crossposted in many situations. They are a fiefdom walled garden and also commonly configured to restrict access. IDK.. use your best judgement. Might suffice to just post in !digi_fiefdom_required@lemmy.sdf.org in those cases.
Also related: !netneutrality@sopuli.xyz
Scope and rules:
What is not relevant here:
- NGOs
- non-profits
- anything in the private sector
This community is focused on tax-funded government programs and services like public education, social services, voter reg, courts, legal statutes, etc. NGOs and non-profits may exist for the pubic benefit, but if they are not funded by force (taxation) then they are not really relevant here.
Recommended style:
- the title should mention the jurisdiction (state/province and/or country)
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