[ohmygodel]

There is no magic bullet here. Here are the things you were probably thinking of and why they won't work:

1. Allow relays to apply individual hidden service (HS) blacklists: HS addresses are not necessarily public, can require authentication to connect to, and are trivial to generate (these are all extremely important properties for anonymous publishing in general). So these CP sites will go even more "dark" once the relay blacklists start being an annoyance. Not to mention that relay blacklists open up an obvious DoS opportunity.

2. Require credentials for HSes and revoke them if they are discovered to be serving CP: There is no apparent way to make identity creation costly in an anonymous world where we must be able to support relatively poor users (e.g. without much CPU, memory, bandwidth, money).

3. Allow authorities to selectively deanonymize certain users or service: There is no way this is going to work in a world where nobody agrees on who the authorities are or what constitutes a legitimate request.

The Tor Project is doing one thing about this problem that is consistent with their mission. They are making accessible safe but useful information about the world of hidden services. In fact, they have a whole funded project on it <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/org/sponsors/S.... Note that this project includes such useful things as improved crawling support, global HS statistics, and discovering public .onion addresses.

[batemanesque]

to be honest I wasn't even thinking as specifically as these suggestions - not that any clear solutions occur to me either. but they should, at the very least, recognize that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. I'd like to think there's a less fatalist & more morally empowered approach available besides "forget it, jake, it's anonymous". side note, it's good to see someone here considering the needs of poorer users