In light of recent accusations, we have taken a measure to prevent people from hiding the identity of sock puppet accounts. For those unaware, TheOnionRouter (or Tor as they usually abbreviate it, lacking all caps) is a system through which anyone can quickly and easily do two things:

1. Hide your true IP address and thus your identity
2. Change your apparent IP address with the click of a mouse so you can seem like a different person

Tor facilitates these things by having your Internet traffic travel through a series of proxies/relays before it lands at the destination.

That second point is obviously the one that affects us the most on the Sift because someone could login through one random proxy/relay identity to submit a video then change to a different one to create a new account and upvote their own video, leaving all traces of this tomfoolery undetectable.

In order to prevent such maliciousness, any Sift users anonymizing their location via a Tor proxy is no longer permitted to login or register. This change is effective now.

(For the record, the recent accounts accused of sock puppetry never used a Tor-anonymized IP address.)