[yanmaani]

I can use more or less all other websites with Tor fine, though. It's only Stack Overflow that insists on this nonsense. On most other sites, including this one, I can even make an account and post.

Is their site really so sensitive as to make reading with Tor impossible?

[alexb_]

If "fine" means "answering a new captcha every time you blink" then yeah, every other website works fine on Tor.

[yanmaani]

In my experience, this has gotten better. That was CloudFlare, and they've stopped now. I can't think of a single site that requires CAPTCHAs for Tor users other than archive.is, actually.

[raxi]

Almost all torrent sites. Generally, "data" sites which people love to scrape and think that Tor is a good tool for that

[foxfluff]

archive.is wastes your time on captchas even if you're not using tor

[floatingatoll]

archive.is requires captchas for iCloud Relay users as well as blocking Cloudflare DNS users, so I wouldn’t consider them to be a Tor-specific example.

[rmbyrro]

Good question. They might be trying to fight SPAM or else. Could just block posting, commenting and up/down voting...

[asmr]

Please define "fine", a majority of websites and services either outright block Tor or severely limit the traffic.

[james-redwood]

Tor generally doesn't work on Google services.

[jbentham]

Is this actually true? I've often used Tor to access Google Docs and Google Maps and to my knowledge have never had a problem. In fact, I'm not even presented with Captchas.

[zozbot234]

YMMV. Google Search might as well be blocked completely, I guess they don't want to deal with all the SEO-targeting search queries that would otherwise come from Tor.

[wanderer_]

I guess they could just not generate any data from your searches, but I guess that defeats the purpose, now doesn't it? :)

[fought4thots]

> Is their site really so sensitive as to make reading with Tor impossible?

Very much so, strange if people here don't understand that, even at the best of times APT's could be discovered down the track by their SO queries, now compare today, with heightened tensions and certain nuclear armed superpowers talking about going to war with each other.

How is this even slightly surprising? SO is vital shit, if you don't agree feel free to null route the site the next time you have a major incident at work :)

[yanmaani]

There are public dumps of all the questions and answers; you'd imagine that anyone paranoid enough simply runs a local mirror.

[jbentham]

Are you actually suggesting that SO/SE are blocking Tor because they intend to track all of their users by their IP addresses (or browser metadata), using national security as a justification?

I still do not understand how blocking Tor helps here. People who are concerned about their security will either use mirror sites, or use data dumps such as what is available at archive.org, or simply not use the SO/SE content at all. The number of users who will abandon Tor and the protection it provides for the express purpose of visiting SO/SE is negligible.

This move will not increase the number of persons who see SO/SE adverts or who are trackable by SO/SE. It will also not decrease the number of persons who will be able to access SO/SE content. So I continue to be mystified about the rationale behind this policy change.