There was a large scale DDoS attack on Oct 21st that hit the US... if you don't know you can read about it here:
www.northjersey.com...
Now I've been trying to access the torrent site using TOR browser which often uses nodes from Russia.
I received a message that the IP address I was using was blocked and that browsers accessing with "Java scripting disabled" would be blocked to
prevent DDoS attacks.
These messages are coming from Cloudflare.com which is some kind of cloud based hosting source which sits at the front end of many websites now to
protect them from DDoS attacks as seen here www.cloudflare.com...
This is a new effect from Oct 21st onward and I'm thinking it maybe has something to do with 2 things:
1) the internet takeover that supposedly happened on Oct 1st (which I admit I know nothing about except that sentence I just spewed out)
2) the massive hack attack of unknown origin and unknown purpose that occurred on Oct 21st.
According to the Cloudflare video "If a hacker or spammer is spotted in one site, CloudFlare instantly responds to thwart the attack."
This basically means that a great number of IP addresses all across the internet (seemingly ones which are setup as nodes for TOR browser usage) are
now on some kind of "naughty list" as hackers.
This is unprecedented as far as I'm aware of. TOR is widely used for both good and bad purposes, but one thing is for sure, if TOR disappears, our
level of knowledge will start to rapidly decline because people use TOR to access and share secret knowledge like "leaks."
Here you can read that the NSA has been battling TOR for a long time: www.nytimes.com...
Maybe they finally found out the best way to stop its usage was from within, by making websites afraid of TOR nodes because they might be
hackers...
I can imagine a time when this style of blocking is more widespread... say you're blocked at the ISP gateway itself, because, for some reason your IP
address is seen as a threat to internet "freedom and security."
Well what if you are required to use an ID to access the internet and that ID becomes part of a blocked "hacker alert list?"
What if you have critical information to share or you need to gather critical information and your internet ID is blocked? You're basically a nobody
all of the sudden. You might as well move to the woods with a pile of guns and start building booby traps.