CloudFlare, Tor, and eliminating CAPTCHAs

Posted Oct 6, 2016 9:02 UTC (Thu) by riteshsarraf (subscriber, #11138)
Parent article: CloudFlare, Tor, and eliminating CAPTCHAs

"..............protecting sites against harmful traffic."

Given how slow tor operates, I still wonder what "harmful traffic" can a tor user generate. The one thing I recollect is using garbage http traffic, targeted against sites, using tor as a proxy. But then again, given how slow tor operates, I don't see that practical.

CloudFlare, Tor, and eliminating CAPTCHAs

Posted Oct 6, 2016 11:02 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

Tor is often faster than just the DNS lookups on my system.

CloudFlare, Tor, and eliminating CAPTCHAs

Posted Oct 7, 2016 1:15 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Harmful traffic isn't limited to automated things like DDoS and cracking attempts: it can also mean direct attacks against the human on the other end, the sort of abuses of telecommunications that would have been sorted out in the past by law enforcement making calls to the perp's ISP and/or VPN provider.

The trouble is that there's no technological solution to that problem that won't also affect Tor's original well-intentioned uses negatively in equal amount. The best they can do is to make automated attacks harder while letting humans (of any disposition) through.