As the most practical contribution to Tor you could make at this point I recommend following Nick's suggestions (repeated below since it was unclear to me if D would receive them). As a decision about what to do personally about your IRC situation I offer the following analogy, which is limited as all analogies are. It's also straying way out of tor-ops territory so I have sent it to the wider or-talk list.
Say you frequent a nightspot, The Chat Club, where you meet all your friends. It's been an integral part of your regular routine for years. One night you are astounded to discover you are barred entry. Upon further enquiry you discover that the establishment had previously had problems with patrons from the Orthodox Church of Scallions (always noticeable in their distinct Tor T-shirts) getting drunk and starting fights. You try to point out that even more fights are started by others, and the relative percentage of fighting people wearing Tor T-shirts is no higher than in the general population; it's a tiny fraction. It's just the bright green color that makes their activities more salient. Furthermore, you were not actually wearing a Tor T-shirt when banned, and you're not actually in the Orthodox Scallion Church. Well they don't know about that; they have a rent-a-cop company who they contract to that decides who to bounce. So you find out that this company lists you (correctly) as a member of the Reformed Church of Scallions whose members all wear traditional black ZKS Freedom T-shirts (these are all pretty geeky religions). It doesn't matter that Reformed Scallions have all taken a vow of nonviolence and teetotaling, and there is not a single instance of one ever being involved in a fight in a bar. They're not interested. And, your favorite nightspot doesn't care either. Even though you point out that it is trivial to instruct their bouncers to distinguish bright green from black, it's just not worth their trouble. So you can either quit your religion and meet your friends at The Chat Club as you alwoys have, or you can decide your princples are too important, and you will need to meet them elsewhere, even if there is no one other place that they all tend to congregate regularly. You might try to convince them all to start frequenting the place up the street, Talkers. Even if they all agree that the Chat Club owner is being an incredible jerk and a bigot, he does run the place where all the cool people are and that has the best music. Plus your friends may be vaguely uneasy to be seen supporting a religious group they're not actually in, even against a bigot. What do you do? Probably there is no one answer that is the best answer for everybody in that situation. Tough call. aloha, Paul -- Paul Syverson () ascii ribbon campaign Contact info at http://www.syverson.org/ /\ against html e-mail On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 11:09:06PM -0400, Nick Mathewson wrote: > On Fri, Jun 09, 2006 at 10:41:03PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > FYI, here was his response. > > > You should reply one last time, and recommend the exitlist script, and > let them know we'll give them techsupport as needed. > > The exitlist script lets them block the Tor nodes that will connect > to them, and not the middleman nodes that won't. > > If they don't go for this, we'd like to know why. If they just hate > anonymity, there's nothing we can do about that. If they just want > something easier to use, they should tell us what damned interface > they would prefer. If they can't be bothered to answer, then at least > we showed we could be bothered to ask. > > yrs, > -- > Nick Mathewson
