AT&T is the worst of the worst. And I boycott them for countless reasons like snooping on their own customers voluntarily without a warrant. It’s really a hard-right corp. In any case, never tried them so I didn’t know they blocked egress 25.

One trick that works if truth-in-advertising laws are in force: ask the sales people before subscribing if the block port 25. They always say “no, we block nothing” (in my experience). So you subscribe and sign the contract. Then when you see they actually block 25, you have a false advertising situation and also a contract violation (if either verbal contracts are enforcable or if you can get it in writing that nothing is blocked). So you complain. In my experience, they give a gratis upgrade to an enterprise level of service that generally has a static IP and no blocks – for the price of the residential plan you signed up for.

They claim its for spam prevention which is why most ISPs actually also block outgoing SMTP port 25.

European ISPs block egress port 25, not American ones, generally. Not sure about the rest of the world.

In Europe, one refuge is to send using the GSM networks, which tend not to block egress 25 for some reason.

Very happy to have learned about tildeverse.org. It gives a great refuge from a lot of the garbage. But I have to ask, if you are part of the tildeverse project why are you on lemmy.world, a centralised exclusive Cloudflare instance? I realise tildeverse does not have a lemmy node but there are many decent ones and LW is probably the most contrary to the tildeverse philosophies.

Sorry for the late reply. But for the record I must say Tails does not do what I want because Tails gives clearnet access. The UI discourages it, but the possibility is there to open a browser on clearnet.

You may be right about Whonix… I have yet to tinker with it.

I like where your head is at but this feels like an impossible stretch. If you have the technical knowledge to run Tails, you aren’t being blocked.

It’s perhaps more complex than you realise. There are several facets to this with a broad range of effects, which is not necessarily just a Tor-acceptance problem.

Tor-blocking sites do not have the decency to so much as state /why/ they have blocked you. They either send a generic “403 forbidden”, or they drop packets and it times out, or you get a broken CAPTCHA. In the latter two cases you can’t even be sure Tor is the issue. They do not treat visitors with dignity. So playing dumb when facing them is a good policy. E.g. “I could not pay my taxes on time because I get this screen:…” then go boomer on them and send a camera pic of a timed out connection. If they take some time to investigate and chase their tails a bit, that’s already a win to some extent, in some situations. We want to penalise them for not even having the decency of transparency.

It’d be like shutting off your water, locking the mechanical room, and suing your landlord

Hence why Qubes is not ideal. But if there is an OS that simply excludes clearnet, I might say (when pressed): “my friend gave me this laptop… said it was safer than Windows”¹. But the conversation never goes that far.

The baby step micro-goal is just to get a bit of due transparency and dignity. Not “403 Forbidden” but rather “We’re sorry, we detect you are using Tor and we do not have the competency to secure against Tor users”, or “we need to track you, thus cannot accept traffic from Tor or VPNs”.

¹ Note that this scenario is becoming increasingly realistic. A local group of volunteers offers gratis advice and support for digital self-defense. Some people walk away with Tails and only a superficial idea of what they have.