TOR

[Ravenflight]

Hey so I was thinking this lovely morning about how you block TOR/ other proxies. I'm just general led interested in how you can tell the difference between a normal IP and one which belongs to TOR. Don't worry i'm not part of the NSA

[Frisbeeteria]

We don't publicly discuss our security procedures. Your idle curiousity is insufficient "need to know".

[Enfaru]

Hey so I was thinking this lovely morning about how you block TOR/ other proxies. I'm just general led interested in how you can tell the difference between a normal IP and one which belongs to TOR. Don't worry i'm not part of the NSA

I'll answer instead of Frisbeeteria because it's rather simple and a matter of public information.

The majority of TOR exit nodes are publically listed. Unless you have a bridge or such like of course, but these cannot be guaranteed to work from one day to the next and often reserved for those that actually need them. Since the exit nodes are publically listed they can be summarily blocked. Unfortunately, TOR opens up a lot of possibility for spam, trolling and other community chaos and for such reasons has to be blocked to keep the community clean.

You will likely find that none-public exit nodes are not blocked by default, particularly newer ones. However these will only exist for as long as people don't break the site rules after which time they're gone as well. You'll find the exact same route with other proxies. Find a lot of spammers/rule breakers, check the common link, ban at will. In some cases using the sledgehammer is the only way to keep the community clean. It makes we wonder though if it's possible for Nationstates to allow certain Nations from a normally blocked ip address ie. If ip == 198.0.0.1 && member != Enfaru then block else allow Enfaru in. .

There is no difference between a normal IP and one that belongs to TOR, it doesn't work that way. If it did, Tor wouldn't exist. The network is fairly decentralized in that there's no guarantee that the exit node is not monitored by the NSA. In fact it's quite likely that the NSA are currently able to perform a 51% attack, so if your aim is avoid them, better hope you're not just using Tor.

Disclaimer: Everything above is both common knowledge and publically available information.