Public resource but access restricted and exclusive

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This community tracks restricted access resources (generally websites) that are supposed to serve taxpayers and the general public, but they fail in that duty by imposing arbitrary restrictions on access. This is where we document these cases.

Most often, it is the Tor community who is marginalised by incompetantly implemented infosystems. This community will be mostly littered with references to tor-hostile public resources to a fatiquing extent, but this is expected. It is not necessarily limited to Tor. Any demographic of people who are refused service would have a relevant story here. E.g. someone traveling outside their country and being denied access to a homeland website on the basis of presumed IP geolocation.

This is very closely related to the [email protected] community. But there are some nuanced differences. Not all fiefdoms are necessarily always restricted access. E.g. some rare Facebook pages are reachable to non-FB users.

And not all manifestations of restricted access entail a fiefdom. E.g. it’s increasingly common for a gov website to block Tor visitors at the firewall without involving a digital fiefdom.

Cases of Cloudflare, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like can be crossposted in many situations. They are a fiefdom walled garden and also commonly configured to restrict access. IDK.. use your best judgement. Might suffice to just post in [email protected] in those cases.

Also related: [email protected]

Scope and rules:

What is not relevant here:

NGOs
non-profits
anything in the private sector

This community is focused on tax-funded government programs and services like public education, social services, voter reg, courts, legal statutes, etc. NGOs and non-profits may exist for the pubic benefit, but if they are not funded by force (taxation) then they are not really relevant here.

Recommended style:

the title should mention the jurisdiction (state/province and/or country)

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(Belgium) The eID authentication site blocks Tor, which has a ripple effect that blocks most public transactions in Belgium (eid.belgium.be)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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If you need to do any kind of public administration in Belgium, such as perform transactions with city hall or the tax authority, for most uses you are redirected to eid.belgium.be to login using a smartcard reader. A PIN and eID serve as the 2nd factor when authenticating on this site.

But eid.belgium.be blocks Tor. Isn’t 2FA enough? Why would the confidence in their security be so low that they are skiddish about someone’s IP address? IMO it’s unlikely that their security confidence is that low. Most likely they want to track the IP address and thus day-to-day of every citizen. Otherwise it makes no sense for this service to block Tor, which mushrooms into being blocked from accessing many essential services.

This is why the right to be analog is important. I think someone in Denmark is working on that. Belgium has an org called something like the gang of angry elders working on the right to be analog.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

I’m not sure what their excuse is but there aren’t enough exit nodes to DDoS a nation state. They are performing an essential but very light service which should involve very little traffic, so competency seems to be lacking. AFAIK they do not do the heavy lifting of all the websites who use them. They just get used for logins. The site that redirects to them does all the work before and after authentication.