Are all Tor exits permanently banned from palemoon.org?

[VA1DER]

I have a hard time getting access to any palemoon.org address (except, ironically, for the forum) over Tor. Is this a permanent ban?

It's unfortunate, because I actually rather like the privacy and anti-fingerprinting features in PM better than in the Tor Browser.

[Moonchild]

Tor access has been blocked due to on-going, persistent abuse from the tor network.
Not sure why you got access to the forum from tor, as it should be blocked.

[andyprough]

Quite a few tech forums won't allow Tor connections. Too much abuse. You can do Tor over VPN, that would give you a workable exit node.

[Basilisk-Dev]

Unfortunately people abuse Tor because of the level of anonymity that it provides. I'd prefer to leave it unblocked but I have it blocked too on several work sites for similar reasons. It's one of those situations where one bad actor ruins it for everyone.

[VA1DER]

I'm clearly not going to single-handedly change minds. But I hope I can give some food for thought.

My VPN gives me, as far as this site is concerned, just as much anonymity as Tor does. The only thing Tor gives me that my VPN doesn't is protection against side channel traffic correlation, which isn't a tool that's available to you anyway. My VPN (and any other) would tell you to go pound sand if you ever wanted to track me down. If I hadn't made an effort when I registered here to be open and use my own public domain email address linked to my ham radio callsign, you'd never know who I was.

So the block is unfortunate, likely 100% ineffectual, and maybe you might think that it sends the wrong message to the privacy conscious you want to court.

The real test of whether you genuinely espouse privacy isn't what you do when someone uses it for the right things. It's how you handle it when they use it for the wrong purposes.

It's ironic, I actually don't like the official "Tor Browser" much - Pale Moon's privacy settings are just better. And Tor is a project who's goals are very compatible with Pale Moon's stated goals.

Quite a few tech forums won't allow Tor connections.

I've been using Tor routinely for a while now. Including here, until my statement that it worked here caused someone to slam that door closed. This is the very first "tech" site that has blocked it wholesale. So this assertion surprised me enough that I started to go down my KeePass tech site list to check. I have yet to find another tech site that blocks Tor users. Including Reddit who, ironically, blocks almost every VPN on the planet out of hand. I tried the following and confirmed there is no issue connecting over Tor:

• Banana Pi
• All tested code incubators (Codeberg, Code Project, Github, Gitlab, Source Hut, Sourceforge)
• All Linux distro sites tested (Debian plus Forum plus about 10 tested mirrors, Ubuntu including Launchpad and all services, Arch plus forum, Fedora plus forum, CentOS plus forum)
• Maker sites: Reprap, PlanetCNC (plus forum), LinuxCNC (plus forum)
• Entire Stack Exchange network (!)
• Ask Libreoffice
• Blend Swap
• DD-Wrt
• Gimp (plus forum)
• Gnome (plus forum)
• GNU everything
• Inkscape (plus forum)
• Lazarus / FreePascal plus forums
• CMake plus forum
• Letsencrypt site plus forum
• OpenWrt
• Oracle, Oracle VirtualBox (plus forum)
• dnswl
• Reddit
• Printerforums.net

[Moonchild]

I appreciate wanting to give some food for thought, but my thoughts on it have been fed plenty on it already over the years. Unless there's a massive shift in use of Tor, we won't be changing this approach.

The real test of whether you genuinely espouse privacy isn't what you do when someone uses it for the right things. It's how you handle it when they use it for the wrong purposes.

Well, this block is exactly that. Unlike what you seem to assume, i.e. going by hearsay reputation and blocking out of principle (which IMO would actually also be an understandable approach for any webmaster), it was not instated until there was such a level of abuse coming from the tor network that we were required to do something about it. So by your own definition, we passed that "real test". We've had open access, we've had partial blocked access e.g. restricting posting replies on the forum from Tor, and we've not been able to stem the abuse with more lenient approaches. A blanket block of all known exit nodes was the only way to deal with it in our case.
I'm sorry if it means some legitimate Tor users (and I fully understand the reasons and nuances of using Tor being beneficial in some use cases; I've done plenty research and even ran a relay in the past, myself) can't have access to our services or website if they use Tor. It is, however, a numbers game. If we have to spend a lot of time on a daily basis dealing with the fallout of allowing Tor users "anonymous" access to our services, then something needs to be done. The choice would then be to restrict community interaction for everyone, or block Tor. The choice should be self-evident.

It is completely irrelevant what other sites do. They will not see the same traffic, they will not be the same organisation and they will not operate in the same context as we do.