It’s one of the ugliest most undignified forms of service refusal. They just simply drop packets from Tor. Not even enough courtesy to send a 403 forbidden. So visitors are left guessing whether the website is down, slow, or giving deliberate mistreatment. People then have to try different browsers with different timeout thresholds to investigate.
There is no apparent mirror or alternative site hosting Florida statutes. Archive.org has a cache of some laws but FL state gets zero credit for that.
(update) in fact there are two state sites for legal statutes and both block tor:
I would love it if someone would successfully argue in court “sorry I broke that law but I could not inform myself of the law because every time I tried to reach the state’s website for statutes it just timed out” – and get away with it.
It’s possible that it’s an accident, but unlikely IMO. The accidental case is overload and timing fragility. Tor introduces a delay, so if a server already has a poor response time and the user’s browser has a short timeout tolerance, then it’s a recipe for a timeout. Firefox does better than Chromium on this (default configs). But I tried both browsers. At the state level I think they made a concious decision to drop packets.
It’s also possible that they are not blocking all of Tor but just the exit node I happened to use. I did not exhaustively try other nodes but I was blocked two different days (thus likely two different nodes). In any case, this forum should help sort it out. Anyone can chime in with other demographics who are blocked, or tor users that are not blocked.
(edit) ah, forgot to mention: www.flsenate.gov also drops Tor packets.
This seems like two odd decisions that I’d really like to know the thought process behind. Why block Tor to begin with, and why specifically packet loss? It makes me wonder if it’s some kind of odd attempt at a honeypot, though that seems unlikely. Thus interesting to know about. Thanks for posting.