MathJax doesn't always load in the Tor Browser even with low Privacy and Security Settings and even using Firefox or Chrome routed through Tor

Created on 26 Sep 2016 · 12Comments · Source: mathjax/MathJax

MathJax sometimes loads (rarely), sometimes doesn't at all, and sometimes it loads but some packages don't work (such as \require{cancel} ...) even do the Tor Browser is with low Privacy and Security Settings

I suspect that this has to do with the fact that cdn.mathjax.org is using CloudFlare which blocks by default all Tor exit nodes by showing them a captcha.

This issue is not limited to the Tor Browser only, if I load tor.exe and configure Firefox and Chrome to route through Tor, the same issue reappears again, with MathJax not loading.

It would be greatly appreciated if there was some way to fix this, as I'm -- along with many others -- a 100% full time Tor user.

Question

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kitroti

Most helpful comment

@domapine thanks for that link! That looks like it could be a solution.

We'll have to discuss it internally.

pkra on 22 Nov 2016

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All 12 comments

Thanks for raising this. I don't know if we will be able to do much about this, but we are open to suggestions. Please note that we don't have the resources to use a different CDN provider.

I'm wondering if one of the access rules mentioned here might help. I'm guessing the only way to do this is to visit one of our pages, e.g., http://cdn.mathjax.org/mathjax/latest/test/examples.html and then hope the confirmation works long enough to be useful (i.e., for a session). Then again, if somebody else uses the same TOR node for something that gets it blocked again, this might not be practical.

I suppose an alternative would be to block our CDN while using a greasemonkey script to inject a local copy of MathJax whenever MathJax is loaded from cdn.mathjax.org. Or maybe redirect cdn.mathjax.org to a local server hosting your own copy of MathJax.

pkra on 26 Sep 2016

Marked as abandoned.

pkra on 31 Oct 2016

@cledecitif thanks for pointing that out. That would be a nice upstream solution should it be successful.

In the mean time, it seems the most pragmatic solution would be to build a plugin or greasemonkey script that replaces calls to the CDN with calls to a local MathJax copy. We're happy to help answer questions but we don't have the resources to maintain such plugins. There's an example of a Chrome extension https://github.com/emichael/texthings (which calls the CDN but that wouldn't be hard to change) for those interested.

pkra on 9 Nov 2016

@pkra You don't even need to change your CDN provider, you can just turn off CloudFlare's captchas: https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170096-How-do-I-turn-the-CloudFlare-captcha-challenge-page-off-

domapine on 16 Nov 2016

@domapine disabling captcha's is only available at the Enterprise-plan level (which does not even have a price point but is definitely beyond our means).

pkra on 16 Nov 2016

@pkra What about the "Essentially Off" option?

domapine on 16 Nov 2016