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Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Which of the 10 URL Shorteners are not hostile to Tor?

I examine 10 URL Shortener Services one by one to evaluate its hostility towards Tor Browser.

Those that put road blocks in the way such as using CAPTCHA or other techniques are classified as hostile services. Another requirement is that it should also operate properly in Android's Orfox, the Android's kind of equivalent to Tor Browser.

If it works in laptop/desktop Tor Browser and not in Orfox, it is still classified as hostile. Any service that requires log in etc. even though not presenting any hostility road blocks is placed in the "Useless" category. Too much trouble.

Tor Browser users should black list those hostile services as they do not possess any uniqueness as the review below shows there are friendly alternatives. In that way the Tor community can deny them of visits and advertising dollars, much like AdBlock Plus.

Tor users can refer to this Tor Project sites for more comprehensive list of Tor hostile sites.

Only 5 out of 10 are Tor friendly. Naturally Google is one of the hostile one.

Tor Friendly site

Bitly
In Orfox, one needs to add cloudfront.net and Googleapis.com to NoScript's whitelist.

TinyURL.com
There are times that this site demands CAPTCHA validation and need more experiment to determine its friendliness.

AdF.ly
One needs to add this to the whitelist in the NoScript in Orfox.

Bit.do

Mcaf.ee
Given this is in beta, it loads slowly but still works in a no-nonsense manner. Hope it will not be hostile to Tor as it matures.


Hostile Services

Goo.gl

Ow.ly

Is.gd

Useless

Is.gd

X.co

Monday, March 14, 2016

Way to by pass Tor Browser hostile web sites

It is really a form of anti-Net Neutrality for web sites, most notably web hosting sites like CloudFlare, to discriminate Tor Browser users by putting all sort of childish barrier in an attempt to prevent Tor Browser users from gaining access to the materials.

Perhaps by comparison, CloudFlare is not as anti-Tor as Akamai which simply greeds Tor users with 404.

It is an easy way out to treat all Tor Browser users in the same boat as those using the tool to abuse the system. If that kind of thinking prevails, may be we should all shut down the Internet as not a day gone by without seeing an attack being carried out on the Internet. Any other way would require intelligence that they have not got and it is also a good sales material of telling their customers that they could block all those abusers using Tor.

Thankfully, there is a way to get past playing their childish game. I simply route the access through Start Page's proxy from Tor Browser. Just do a search on the link from Tor Browser and then uses the proxy to access it.



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