Indeed the IRS website blocks Tor users from accessing tax information, as if tor users don’t need tax information. Important legal guidance exists on irs.gov, so it’s obviously an injustice to block people from becoming informed about their rights and obligations.
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What’s the fix? Would it be effective to make a FOIA request on paper so the IRS must send the info on paper via USPS? Or would that require compensation to offset their burden?
Indeed, it is not binary. I’m glad you can see that now. Availability has scope, and for the IRS, tor is not in that scope. This is not a security issue. Continue to scream into the void about how literally any impediment to every form is access is a security issue, but that’s not how any of this works. Given you seem to keep bringing up course work and professors and this naive view of security, I’m assuming you’re a student. Keep studying.
It is an option. Saying “nuh uh” doesn’t make it not an option.
This serves as availability. You have TLS, postage, and physical locations you can utilize. You are just whining. Your refusal to use any of the plethora of means available to you has no relation to the competency of the IRS’ security. Grow up.
I said not necessarily binary. Your inability to grasp the various different contexts is profound. The non-binary usage is a red herring in this discussion. When you universally deny a whole demographic of people access, that’s binary. It’s a hard and fast total loss of availability for that demographic.
The scope is the American taxpayer. Of course Tor users are in that scope. You cannot deny access to a whole demographic of people on the crude and reckless basis of IP reputation and then try to redefine the meaning and purpose of availability to offset your incompetence. You need to face the facts and admit when you don’t have the skill to separate threat agents from legit users. Screaming until your blue in the face about how you would like availability to be defined does not bring availability to the demographic of legit users being denied access.
I only brought up school because at your level that seems to be where you are. My infosec MS came decades ago.
Saying the contrary does not make a demographic of people magically part of a different demographic of people. Who do you think you are fooling by pointing to demographic A saying “they have access” in response to demographic B not having access?
Wrong demographic. That’s not anonymous.
You mean postal service. Again, wrong demographic. That’s not anonymous. The IRS needs your physical address in the very least.
Wrong demographic. That’s neither anonymous nor reachable outside the country.
Your refusal to accept that a demographic of people are denied availability has backed you into a corner making absurd claims to justify incompetence. The growth and evolution is needed on your part. To give demographics of non-anonymous people access to tax material continues to miss the point about loss of availability to people who are.
It’s really not. You’ve been asserting that there’s somehow a lack of security because they don’t support tor because that means they’re failing on the “availability” point of the CIA triad. That’s incorrect.
This is also incorrect. The scope is the American taxpayer who is able and willing to utilize the website. You are either unable or unwilling. You are not in the scope. You absolutely can block entire swaths of address ranges and, in fact, have better security because you did so.
A lot has changed from decades ago, you might consider going back to school.
Neither is tor. And even if tor did provide perfect anonymity, tough shit. You are again just whining. Nobody owes you the ability to “anonymously” download tax material at your preferred comfort level of anonymity.
Before you can claim it’s not a red herring, you must first grasp what is claimed as the red herring. Your reply displays that you don’t. When a demographic of people are wholly denied availability, and you make the false assertion that availability is /never/ binary, it’s both incorrect and irrelevant. Incorrect because you can have 100% loss of availability in a context. Context is important. And it’s incorrect because people without access are inherently without availability.
THAT’s incorrect. That’s the sort of weasel wording that people can see right through. You’ve taken the whole of taxpayers who are entitled (in fact obligated) to file tax, and excluded some of them as a consequence of infosec incompetence. You cannot redefine the meaning of a term to justify incompetence. It’s purpose defeating for PR damage control.
This is where your lack of infosec background clearly exposes itself. You can also /randomly/ block large swaths of people arbitrarily and with the same mentality claim “better security” because you think a baddy likely got blocked, a claim that inherently requires disregarding availability as a security factor. You will fool people with that as you’re pushing a common malpractice in security which persists in countless access scenarios because availaibility to the excluded is disregarded by the naive and unwitting.
Nonsense. Infosec, comp sci, and all tech disciplines cover most diligently principles and theory which are resilient over decades, not tool-specific disposable knowledge. The principles and theories have not changed in the past 20 years. You seem to be in a program that short-cuts the principles and fixates on disposable knowlege, likely a vocational / boot camp type of school, in which case you should consider transferring to a school that gives more coverage on theory - the kind of knowledge that doesn’t age so fast.
WTF? You don’t know how Tor works. Perfection is never on the table in the infosec practice. You should forget about perfection – it’s distracting you. But Tor most certainly provides anonymity in the face of countless threat agents, among other features.
“Owes” implies a debt. I never spoke of owing or debts. The IRS has an obligation to inform the public. When they exclude demographics of people from their service (in particular people who funded them), it’s an infosec failure and an injustice.
It is important. Which is why claiming there’s a security issue because they don’t support tor is silly. Just don’t use tor. The website also doesn’t support the entire demographic of people who don’t use tech at all, like the Amish. No reasonable person would say that’s a security issue.
No, it’s absolutely correct. You can continue to whine that they don’t support your particular use case, but that’s your problem. The documents and services are all available right now for all Americans. You insisting on using your niche protocol is nobody’s problem but your own.
This is a stawman. Tor is notorious for bad actors. Not even remotely the same as blocking addresses at random.
You really need to go back to school. No principle and no theory in infosec requires every protocol be available in order to achieve “availability”. All of these fields are relatively new and still evolving.
Indeed, that’s what I was saying.
So does a VPN, you twit.
English your second language? It’s fine if it is, just know that “debt” and “obligation” are synonyms.
Anything to be a victim. Grow up. Nobody owes you tor access.
Reread the thread. You’ve already been told that you can’t dress up a deliberate act of sabatage as merely “neglecting to support”. It’s the same silly claim that it was the first time you made it.
The Amish did not have a viable means of access that was artificially removed by a proactively inserted firewall rule. This fallacy of analogy shows your inability to grasp the absurdity of the comparison.
Of course if you don’t grasp the fact that the Tor DoS is not lack of support but rather a proactive disabling of something that naturally works, then it’s clear why it appears absurd to you. But the appearance in your view is due to not understanding that servers serve Tor out of the box by default (unlike the Amish).
You clearly don’t know what that word means. I presented my own argument, not yours. My words - my argument - simply exposes the absurdity of the basis of your claim as quoted. Hence why I quoted you without paraphrasing.
Sure, but you’re neglecting proportionality. Cars are notorious for drive-by shootings. But we don’t ban cars on that basis because (like Tor) the numbers of legit users far outnumber the baddies. We don’t oppress a whole community because less than 1% of that community has a harmful element – unless we are a corrupt tyrant deporting all possible deportable immigrants, or an incompetent admin blocking the whole Tor community.
Of course it is. Both scenarios block an arbitrary group of legitimate users who are exposed to collateral damage as a consequence of prejudiced trivia with the effect of collective punishment. Only to then claim “security is better” on the off chance that a baddy was blocked, without realizing that availability consequences are selectively overlooked.
While claiming that anonymity is non-existent on the basis of lack of perfection – perfection that you now concede we never have.
Yes, to a much lesser extent than Tor in far fewer scenarios, of course, with higher doxxing risks by a motivated adversary. And? Are you just going to leave the red herring there like that or did you have a point?
I was about to ask you that. You clearly are struggling. “Owing” is /not/ a drop-in replacement for “obligation”. Anyone who speaks English as their first language would be aware of that nuance and spot your conflation of the words instantly. It’s like you are entering an off translation.
There it is again. You continue to misuse that word – in this case to build a man of straw. I already rejected your first attempt at redefining my position as being owed something.
You’re trying to turn this into semantics. They don’t support tor. That’s a factual statement.
You presented a strawman and attacked that strawman.
Blocking tor is not the same as blocking random IP addresses. There’s really no point in pressing with this analogy.
Did I make that claim? I recall saying tor doesn’t provide you with perfect anonymity. Another factual statement.
Cool, so use a VPN.
It’s a synonym. Maybe you should look up synonym while you’re at it. The IRS is not obligated to support tor and they do not owe you that support.
That’s what you’re doing when you say:
That’s not the words of intellectual honesty. The honest and straight-shooting way to say it without weasel wording is to say they are blocking Tor. Accurate. Simple. Does not mask the fact that it’s a proactive initiative.
An analogy is not a strawman. If I wanted to present I strawman, I would have had to present the analogy as your argument. I did not. It was my analogy.
you did, in the context of Tor:
That is not what you said. Look above. Also, your newly revised statement (Tor not being perfect anonymity) is tue but an irrelevant waste of time, as you have been told twice already. Again, you’re distracting yourself with this pointless chase for perfection. Forget about perfection. It’s not a reasonable expectation for the infosec discipline.
Not it’s not.
Your reliance on a dictionary is not helping you. You’re not going to understand nuanced differences between near synonyms from a dictionary. You need to be immersed in an English speaking culture to reach that level of understanding.
You keep trying to pull this down to semantics because you don’t have a leg to stand on. Nobody owes you tor access. Nobody is obligated to allow tor access.
You have options, you’re just refusing to use them, probably because you just picked up using tor for the first time out of high school and, like all young idealists, took a hard line on it. Grow up.
Really recommend you go look at a dictionary, thesaurus, and some introductory material on security.