[afreak]

Tor allows for rampant abuse and is problematic to prevent. Many IRC networks ban it due to this.

However, the solution is to make it so if you want to use Tor on an existing that you instead connect via a hidden service address, allowing the IRCd to mark you as a Tor user and then allow channels to stem abuse.

[lucb1e]

I said an internal Tor relay, not an exit node. My IP cannot be abused for irc spam. These Quakenet guys are just against tor.

I am also on some blacklist, and while I can still connect to most channels, some don't work anymore. Because of this blacklist I cannot join #help, which is the channel I must connect to if I want to ask them anything, such as which blacklist I'm on. Finally I got a friend of mine to ask them for me and a #help operator /queried me (private chat), but they won't disclose which blacklists they use. Meanwhile I haven't been able to find any, and if I'm on something, I wouldn't know what for.

So that's my experience with Quakenet, censorship and non-disclosure of blacklists. Then they publish this and reach #1 on Hackernews? Come on. Bullshit. They don't give a flying fuck about freedom of speech.

[mst]

irc.perl.org doesn't disclose its BOPM config either.

This is because when we're getting attacked we want to force the attackers to go to the trouble of trying to connect, rather than being able to filter their set of available client nodes to the ones not blacklisted before attempting to connect. Makes attacks more obvious and makes attackers work harder.

Free, volunteer run services sometimes have to make decisions that prioritise being able to deal with problems within the available resources over the well being of the occasional individual user who ends up being caught as a false positive.

After all, if the network just got taken down entirely, it can't transmit any speech at all.