this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2025
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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:

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.

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There are copious hosts in the europa.eu domain. Most of them rudely stonewall Tor users without explanation. Ironically, sometimes they are asking for public feedback on a privacy-related policy but then they block Tor users who would have the most insight.

Few examples of EC sites that are exclusive access:

  • commission.europa.eu
  • single-market-economy.ec.europa.eu
  • energy-efficient-products.ec.europa.eu

Often an open access host links into commission.europa.eu, so people might be part way through a transaction and cannot proceed.

At least eur-lex.europa.eu is open access. That’s the most important one because it publishes enacted law. Yet commission.europa.eu is quite important so definately an injustice that that site is access restricted.

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