21 ms·

BBC News launches 'dark web' Tor mirror

765 points by worldofmatthew 7y ago

jonplackett 7y ago
Finally a good use for my license fee! (Aside from David Attenborough documentaries, they’ve always been worth it)
- petepete 7y ago
  And a fair chunk of both BBC 4 and BBC Radio 4.
  - halfer53 7y ago
    Lol
- jen729w 7y ago
  Licence fee. 🇬🇧
  - uryga 7y ago
    offtopic, but how'd you get an emoji in a HN comment?? (maybe it doesn't get stripped bc the flag is encoded as [U][K], two "letterlike symbols" but still it's the first time i've seen one!)
    - bb123 7y ago
      I guess it is probably because most people are using desktops/laptops to browse HN. I feel like Emoji use on QWERTY keyboards is harder/less common. It is possible though: 🇺🇳
      - uryga 7y ago
        i was referring to the fact that last time i checked, HN stripped emoji. hold on let me check: edit: yeah, my cat got removed :/ I guess they're distinguished by unicode block: the regional indicator letters are "Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement", and emoji are "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs". still not sure why remove them though
        bb123 7y ago
        Can you see my UN flag? I also posted one of their easter island faces but that got stripped.
        buckminster 7y ago
        But I had to zoom right in to see which flag it was. So it fails as a flag.
        uryga 7y ago
        actually no, i can't! it just shows "U N" in a bold blue capital letters, which explains some of the confusion i guess. (Android 7.0)
      - reaperducer 7y ago
        On a Mac, if you have the input menu enabled in the menu bar, selecting "Show Emoji & Symbols" will pop open a palette allowing you to put all kinds of things into pretty much any text input. System Preferences → Keyboard → Show input menu in menu bar
      - ToastyMallows 7y ago
        On Windows you can hit Win+; to pull up an emoji keyboard!
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - hombre_fatal 7y ago
      Quite a lot of emoji are allowed on HN. I once saw someone make a post enumerating them all.
- rvz 7y ago
  > Finally a good use for my license fee! While I agree that no news corporation should ever be censored and should be accessible to all including the "dark-web", the level of clickbait / fake-news level content on the BBC website is getting ridiculous in some areas and contradicts with their duty to be fair, impartial and balanced as the only UK state broadcaster privileged with a royal charter. Apart from the actual World News section, the front page + newsbeat section is completely littered with frivolous cringe-worthy content and memes that isn't worth paying attention to, neither is purchasing the TV license for.
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    They seem to have made it their task to report in depth on every single violent crime in the country. Being from Germany and having never lived in the UK, this is weird to me. For a crime to end up on tagesschau.de (the German equivalent to bbc.co.uk/news ) it needs to be of... well... national interest. This just seems like yellow press, honestly. Or is there something I'm missing? edit: also their "reporting" on anything climate related is amazing. It's no wonder that extinction rebellion, a movement originating in the UK, has as the first demand to "tell the truth". At first I was confused because climate change in my media consumption was a regularly occurring topic. But then I checked the bbc website. See [1] for a screenshot. This is at a time, mind you, when the whole of Europe was shattering temperature records left and right, and Greenland was melting. And they choose to report on a thumb wrestling tournament. [1]: http://muchmuch.coffee:8989/blobs/get/&Jwu6gu4Ub33VBWbmz6YbTXM85jPmXtBPL8/F0Uhiy9M=.sha256 http://muchmuch.coffee:8989/blobs/get/&Jwu6gu4Ub33VBWbmz6YbT...
    - amigiac 7y ago
      They say the BBC bend to the wishes of the current government, they seem in recent years to be bending towards the Daily Mail, using fear-mongering to attract clicks and viewers, ignoring climate change protests to not put off car owners. Joining in with the newspapers by smearing anyone who speaks against the Tory party.
      - goatinaboat 7y ago
- Mobius01 7y ago
  I’m very grateful for all paying the license fees. Through the BBCs language education programs I was able to learn English and it changed the course of my life. So thank you!
sanxiyn 7y ago
You can also visit facebookcorewwwi.onion.
- RandomGuyDTB 7y ago
  Possibly the most famous darkweb URL.
  - blaser-waffle 7y ago
    I feel like Dread Pirate Roberts would have something to say about that.
    - blotter_paper 7y ago
      I think GP means that facebook spent a lot of CPU cycles getting an onion address that is so human-readable/memorable; I don't remember what the old Silk Road's address was but I think I'd remember if it were silkroadcorewwwi.onion
- akavel 7y ago
  Are you using it? does it work? when I tried to use it some long time ago, it was unusably broken (asked me to validate my account by recognizing photos of some friends, but each photo was showing as a blank white rectangle).
- nestofet 7y ago
  Belenarnau7
nyolfen 7y ago
i’m not sure why. if someone is already using the tor network, presumably they could use it to bypass censorship to access the clearnet bbc site.
- Xophmeister 7y ago
  From TFA: While the Tor browser can be used to access the regular version of the BBC News website, using the .onion site has additional benefits. "Onion services take load off scarce exit nodes, preserve end-to-end encryption [and] the self-authenticating domain name resists spoofing," explained Prof Steven Murdoch, a cyber-security expert from University College London.
- oskenevd 7y ago
  Because so much of the bbc website is http, today, in 2019. At least you now get TLS between the browser and the bbc server. Accessing bbc over Tor normally leaks cleartext http to the exit nodes.
  - toby- 7y ago
    The vast majority of the BBC's services use HTTPS nowadays, including BBC News, BBC Bitesize, Sounds/Radio, CBBC and CBeebies, etc. Only pre-2010 news stories are HTTP. The only other parts that remain HTTP (that I've seen) are certain archived content, e.g. the older Learning[0] and Languages[1] portals. [0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/coursesearch/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/coursesearch/ [1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/
    - Sami_Lehtinen 7y ago
      Here's fresh article which refuses to be served over HTTPS. get "https://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghostly-wrecked-ships" https://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghos... Location: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghostly-wrecked-ships http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghost... BBC is one of very few sites on my HTTP allowed list. By default I've disabled HTTP completely.
_Understated_ 7y ago
Not a fan of the clickbait title... Seems a bit unfair to equate wanting to protect privacy with the dark web where people associate it with drugs and paedophiles and whatnot. Very clickbaity from the BBC.
- toby- 7y ago
  Most people understand Tor to be the 'dark web', so I wouldn't call it clickbait. Hell, it is the dark web. It's you who's wrongly associating it with paedophilia and drugs (both amply available on the 'clearnet') IMO, which does quite a disservice to attempts to promote Tor to the newly privacy-conscious. 'Dark' means hidden, not 'evil'.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    You can nitpick all you want but both the "dark" and "hidden" words sound sinister to a lot of people.
  - _Understated_ 7y ago
    Straight away in the article they spell it out and make the link between Tor and the dark web: > The Tor browser is privacy-focused software used to access the dark web Yes it is. But that's the worst thing it's used for. It's like saying 12-gauge shotguns are used for bank robberies... Ok, I'm stretching the point but it's needlessly putting the association of privacy focused browsing using Tor with the nasty shit that some people do with it. Edit: I realise my understanding of The Dark Web was incorrect so this argument is invalidated now but I'll leave it up.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > Yes it is. But that's the worst thing it's used for. The "dark" in dark web doesn't mean "bad", it's darkness to prying eyes. If you buy drugs on the dark web, it's the dark web. If you read literature on the dark web that your government doesn't want you to read, it's the dark web as well. The negative connotations you're associating with it are what this step by the BBC will help reduce: pointing out that the criminal use isn't the primary use of the dark web. Privacy is.
andrewaylett 7y ago
I know there are good reasons why it's not fully secure, but I'd really like to be able to access `.onion` addresses in my regular browser over TOR and everything else directly as usual. In _this_ I'm not over-worried about the risk of deanonymisation as my aim is on one hand access to resources I don't have access to now and on the other hand legitimisation of TOR as something that anyone could reasonably use, even (or especially!) if they have "nothing to hide".
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- elagost 7y ago
  The way to do that is just to use Tor Browser as your regular browser.
  - ivankolev 7y ago
    I know it is based on Firefox, do they keep updated with upstream?
    - Santosh83 7y ago
      Yes, they base Tor browser upon the latest Firefox ESR so it has the same security fixes as that...
  - Phlogi 7y ago
    No, because the Tor Browser sends all traffic through the tor network and exit nodes.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Why is that bad, per se? In practice some sites drop Tor connections, and localisations come through wrong, but that doesn't seem to be why you said "no".
      - 7y ago
mxuribe 7y ago
It certainly seems like they're doing this with good intentions. If so, the BBC is to be applauded!
farummi 7y ago
BBC World News has a similar purpose as Voice of America (VOA) and Russia Today (RT). The purpose is to deliver the viewpoint of the UK to other countries, such as Iran, Russia, China.
- Zenst 7y ago
  https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/history/story/2007/02/070123_html_1990s.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/history/story/2007/02/0701...
  - ArchieLeach 7y ago
    The BBC is quite subtle. It's not fake news and what they report is factual, but the choice of what facts to report makes it crystal clear that they do have an agenda. A current example: Hongkong. They have headline reporting every time there is a protest while other protests in other countries, and arguably much more significant protests, barely get a mention. This is not a coincidence. Edit: A lot of the replies to this comment try to rationalise. This is being willfully blind. Noam Chomsky has written a lot about the issue of raltive importance of reporting in order to manipulate public opinion. This is exactly what is happening because it should be obvious to everyone that there is a campaign against China ongoing.
    - Zenst 7y ago
      Hasn't the HongKong protests been going on for a while and with changing dynamics in protests and response. BBC reported many protests, is there one in particular that should of been more reported upon that springs to mind - for me, nope. https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=protests https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=protests Sure choice of facts and style can and does show a middle-left bias, but as for agenda. If it is that crystal clear, then what is it! I will say though, the trend of media outlets to report opinions of interviewers as news and for the populus to take those avenues of news and run with them as facts, has been something that plays out upon social media. This then as we have seen, is used by news outlets as sources of news (ala Tweets have becomes news sources now). This does create the potential for massive feedback loops. But then, no media outlet seems immune to that.
dev_north_east 7y ago
Don't really see the point of this and am tbh slightly irked at a wastage of my licence fee.
- that_lurker 7y ago
  This allows anyone that has access to TOR to read BBC. Many countries might block outside news organizations.
  - dev_north_east 7y ago
    Yes I understand that. 1 - Can the same not be achieved via VPN usage? 2 - Can TOR browsers not already access the BBC in the "clearnet"? 3 - Why do I, as a UK resident, have to provide money so that someone in Vietnam can access our state news?
    - hkt 7y ago
      Soft power. So people around the world see things our way. The likelihood of this being immensely costly is near nil, by the way.
    - sambe 7y ago
      The license fee is not the BBC's only source of funding. Its worldwide operations are generally profitable.
      - rvz 7y ago
        That's true, most broadcasters have to also bid for broadcasting contracts which give them a-lot of revenue too if they win. However, UK audiences tend to question the TV license if the BBC does anything out of their duty. But non-UK audiences will see ads on the site that will eventually be clicked on. So what does the BBC do? Increase more click-bait articles on newsbeat, entertainment, brexit sections to make up for their lost UK audience that are now on other news or streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.
    - 7y ago
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
beokop 7y ago
I’m getting an Internal Server Error at the Tor site, I guess this means it’s more popular than they expected?
class4behavior 7y ago
Since no one posted that, yet: Tor relies on the size the of its network to counteract blocks, prevent take overs, and naturally ensure stability as well as performance. You can either donate to various groups running Tor servers, the developers, or take part on your own. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://donate.torproject.org/ https://donate.torproject.org/ Also, as a side note, in countries where Tor access is actively inhibited, users may need to rely on bridges. https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://blog.torproject.org/how-use-meek-pluggable-transport https://blog.torproject.org/how-use-meek-pluggable-transport https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  Is it worth it to donate, or to just pool a little cash and start your own? Like, how do I know any of those links aren't the NSA? I ask because I have 5-6 Raspberry Pis, a couple retired Supermicro boxes, and old Cisco gear that isn't doing much...
  - LeifCarrotson 7y ago
    Donations are probably better, because while that hardware is helpful, it's the ISP connections that are hard to come by. If you host a Tor exit node on your home network connection, Comcast is likely going to shut down your service for abuse/TOS violations. Having some rack space in a datacenter is far more valuable and better supported by donations.
    - okcando 7y ago
      How does this use case differ from (legal) distributed file sharing, like Bittorrent, which people do at home all the time?
      - solarkraft 7y ago
bloogsy 7y ago
Hooray, now you can get pro-Tory bias no matter where you are!
movieswebsite 7y ago
https://tezmovieswebsite.blogspot.com/2019/10/love-sex-aur-dhokha-2019-full-movie.html https://tezmovieswebsite.blogspot.com/2019/10/love-sex-aur-d...
breadandcrumbel 7y ago
As far as I know, TOR doesn't work well in China
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Correct. Every time a new version / protocol is released, it works for a little while and then they adapt their firewall to block it.
  - cnThrowaway 7y ago
    Here is my idea to fight The Great Firewall: Embed banned content in "normal" https websites like this one. The content can either be static like mirrors of banned sites (wikipedia, BBC and the tor website). It would be at secret locations. The site should randomly pick a few of it's Chinese users. When they visit public pages, they will be redirected to the secret locations. (With a welcome message). It will appeal to apolitical Chinese, because they will feel they are unraveling secrets. It will be hard for the Chinese government to clamp down: They will struggle to identify these websites and when they shut them down, they will hurt their own industries.
    - DuskStar 7y ago
      I think most Chinese - even apolitical Chinese - will think it's a government-inserted purity test, and immediately leave. If it becomes successful, then China will make that fear real, and start running the same thing themselves.
zaphod420 7y ago
Ethereum has contract call ENS (Ethereum Name Service). It's kind of like a decentralized DNS. People are starting to use that to create .eth domain names that point to .onion sites. https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/list-of-ens-names-that-resolve-to-tor-onion-websites-99140a4c674f https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/list-of-ens-nam...
- solarkraft 7y ago
  Why is this of interest?
  - zaphod420 7y ago
    .onion urls are difficult to remember. ENS provides human readable names that point to .onion urls.
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  I think DNS is one of the top two most appropriate uses for blockchains. Besides the auctions and the TLD, what are the tradeoffs you're aware of between ENS and Namecoin? There's a part of me that feels like having One True Blockchain for everything sounds cool, but I also think Ethereum might be overkill for what is essentially a key-value store. Is there a formal ENS whitepaper with all the relevant high-level details in one document that my google-fu is failing to find, or are these web docs and the github code the best starting point right now? https://docs.ens.domains/ https://docs.ens.domains/
helios893 7y ago
BTW NYtimes has been doing this for a while. https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york-times-as-a-tor-onion-service-e0d0b67b7482 https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york... https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/ https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/
- blotter_paper 7y ago
  Lulz, what good is a paywalled tor site? Does NYT accept crypto, or do you have to get throwaway plastic to pay them pseudonymously?
  - clubm8 7y ago
    Is it paywalled? Maybe your exit node was used to scrape? I don't read NYT much but when I've checked out the .onion such as today I've had no issue reading articles.
    - tobias2014 7y ago
      I'm getting "Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.", then click on the "Create a free account button" to be finally faced with "This action is not supported over Onion yet, sorry.".
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      The concept of exit nodes does not apply to .onions.
- privdev 7y ago
  Yet does not allow you to sign up anonymously. I'm still not sure why you need to host a tor site unless your server is in a censored country.
zimbatm 7y ago
Imagine if CloudFlare or another CDN provider were to automatically public websites on Tor. This would be huge to drive legitimate traffic into the system. It should be trivial to publish your content on Tor as well as the clear web.
- jgrahamc 7y ago
  You mean like the Cloudflare Onion Service that we launched a year ago: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/ It performs an automatic upgrade to use the .onion from Cloudflare if you use TBB (and Brave).
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    I've always wanted to use this (and enabled it on all my sites, e.g. www.stavros.io), but it has never worked for me, I can always see the alt-svc header in the response (using TBB 9.0).
  - zimbatm 7y ago
    wow nice!
- hamilyon2 7y ago
  Someone always mentions that it is already easier to publish website via tor because you don't need ip address and dns record.
aykutcan 7y ago
I am annoyed by the clickbait title. it is like calling knife as murder weapon.
- eyeinthepyramid 7y ago
  Dark web isn't inherently negative though, is it? It's not like they called it pedo-web.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    It's very negative.
    - apecat 7y ago
      Yeah. It's a term we've got to live with though: it's too widely used in media. That's why news and public service actors with global ambitions launching onion services is likely a huge net gain in the long run.
    - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
      Think about it as dark side of the moon - an invisible place.
    - blotter_paper 7y ago
      I agree that it's bad optics, but personally I think it sounds shway. If we're gonna live in a dystopian future where we have to evade omnipresent government surveillance using illegal* code, it might as well sound like something out of an '80s sci-fi novel or a '90s anime. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ *Currently illegal in some jurisdictions, more coming soon!
- justinmchase 7y ago
  They did put "dark web" in scare quotes to soften the blow a little.
crusty511 7y ago
> The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. Bit ironic given that the influence of the government at the BBC.
keithnoizu 7y ago
Forgive the useless quip, but it's a shame Jimmy Savile couldn't be alive to see his two worlds collide like this.
- EasyTiger_ 7y ago
  Perfect.
abstractbarista 7y ago
Many of you with homelabs ought to check out how to run a Tor relay or bridge. It's been fun setting mine up, and after a while I started getting lots of traffic! No data cap on a symmetric fiber connection, so I might as well share the love!
- tenebrisalietum 7y ago
  This is different from an exit node, right?
  - bureaucrat 7y ago
    Don’t worry. You won’t get a subpoena or get a surprise visit from you-know-what. Tor relays just relays data, while exit nodes relay data from tor to Internet.
- skissane 7y ago
  Once upon a time, I tried running a relay at home. Certain websites started blocking my IP - their operators wanted to block exit nodes, but indiscriminately blocked all IPs from the Tor directory, both exit nodes and relay nodes. At that point, I stopped doing it.
  - throwaway87378 7y ago
    Tor bridges do not have this problem, do not consume a lot of bandwidth, and are very useful for people who need to circumvent firewalls. I have been running one for years without any issues. The Tor Project is currently looking for more volunteers to run bridges: https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-internet https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-inte...
cyphar 7y ago
I'm confused why they're running a v2 onion address -- v3 has many benefits in terms of privacy and DoS resistance. I get that the onion addresses are longer, but you can run both in parallel.
steeleduncan 7y ago
Potentially I am misunderstanding how Tor's onion routing works, but according to https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html there are about 6000 tor relays right now. Surely if some well funded organisation (Eve) were to install a similar number of relays itself, then it is reasonably likely that for a given user a packet would eventually travel across relays solely owned by Eve, and at that point Eve could map a Tor address to a physical IP? Operating 6000 nodes in a manner unlikely to cause suspicion , and correlating packets across those nodes, is a massive undertaking, but it seems that it would be well within the means of e.g. NSA. Would this work, or am I missing something fundamental about how Tor works?
- xvector 7y ago
  I believe this would work, and is one of the weak points of the ecosystem. I wonder what the impact of spinning up 6K relays in AWS across the globe would be like. I would say that spinning up 6K instances would be affordable for even small companies.
  - steeleduncan 7y ago
    Yes, the cost wouldn't be prohibitive. It is not hard to see how it could be profitable for a small security company to do this and sell the information on.
  - noident 7y ago
    You can't just spin up 6k new relays and take over the Tor network without somebody noticing. The network is actively monitored for sybil attacks, and it takes 2+ weeks before a new node is "trusted" with significant traffic, giving network monitors plenty of time to blacklist you. What's going to kill Tor is a global passive adversary, meaning someone with perfect visibility of all traffic going in and out of Tor nodes by tapping network infrastructure and correlating at the endpoints. I'm sure the NSA is working on this. They couldn't do it in 2013, but what could they have accomplished in the 6 years since the Snowden leaks? It's also possible to use machine learning to "fingerprint" encrypted blobs entering guard nodes and correlate them with websites (even onion services!), although it gets less feasible as the set of potential websites increases.
throwaway8491 7y ago
Some of BBC News' .onion neighbors are forced to constantly rotate their URLs to evade DDoS attacks (notably Empire Market). Admins constantly publish new PGP-signed links to https://dark.fail https://dark.fail . DDoS attackers then scrape this site, shift their attacks. Sites stay online, but users are trained to expect URLs to constantly change. This has resulted in a huge spike in phishing attacks. Tor hidden services are notoriously difficult to protect from DDoS attacks due to its code being mostly single-threaded. Build 5000 circuits to any darknet site, max out one core on the server, and you take it offline. Cheers to BBC for this great step forward for privacy. Hopefully their traffic surges to bring more attention to .onion scaling problems.
- clubm8 7y ago
  My pet theory is that these DDOS attacks are not just other merchants. I believe state actors are DDOSing to force traffic through nodes they control to deanonymize traffic.
  - bashallah 7y ago
    Flood certain gates to ease monitoring of specific nodes. Easy ROI
- badrabbit 7y ago
  Can't you do IP load balancing and run multiple Tor processes to handle different circuits?
- cyphar 7y ago
  While it doesn't solve the problem entirely, onionbalance[1] does mean that you can have more than one server handle traffic. There's also IP load balancing. [1]: https://github.com/DonnchaC/onionbalance https://github.com/DonnchaC/onionbalance
statusquoantefa 7y ago
To be clear, they're talking about the un-intellectual dark web: they aren't yet willing to take the risk featuring in-band IDW viewpoints on their pages or airwaves. Probably, in the face of trends like Brexit and a sense of their declining popularity, this is phase one of preparing to take their resistance underground if they have to.
- knolax 7y ago
  From Wikipedia on IDW: "The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a neologism coined by American mathematician Eric Weinstein, and popularized in a 2018 editorial by Bari Weiss. The term refers to a group of public personalities who oppose what they see as the dominance of progressive identity politics and political correctness in the media and academia." Seems like the conventional usage of the term "Dark Web" predates your usage, and is more relevant given that we're on a tech forum.
lacampbell 7y ago
There's a bit of irony in the UK state run broadcaster doing this, giving the UKs poor track record on freedom of speech.
tootahe45 7y ago
I don't see the point of this, nobody is censoring politically correct speech. Aren't they literally govt funded too?
- LilBytes 7y ago
  China and Russia would both like a word with you.
  - sacrificedcapon 7y ago
    I think you missed his point. Neither china nor russia censor "politically correct" speech. Of course their view of "politically correct" is different from ours and others. Europe, Islamic world, Africa, etc all protect "politically correct" speech and censor "politically incorrect" speech. Sadly, in the US, extremists ( particularly the left ) are leading the charge to censor "politically incorrect" speech.
    - Twixes 7y ago
      Hardly are there any "extremist" leftists in the US (never heard of any advocating for a revolution) and any calls for censorship come from a tiny minority of Tumblr–like social justice warriors.
      - sacrificedcapon 7y ago
        Agreed that the number of extremist leftists are small in the US. Unfortunately, many of those "Tumblr-like social justice warriors" work in the academia, media and government and wield disproportionate power. And if you haven't heard of any talk of revolution, you must have lived in seclusion somewhere in the woods and missed out on 3 years of post-Trump hysteria. Lucky you.
        Twixes 7y ago
        Where is the seizing of the means of production? Even nationalization of companies is a no–no. Political discourse is radically liberal economically in the US (thanks, Mr. Reagan) so there's really little leftism in the left.
spoown 7y ago
Excellent initiative... would to see more of these...

jonplackett 7y ago

Finally a good use for my license fee! (Aside from David Attenborough documentaries, they’ve always been worth it)

petepete 7y ago
And a fair chunk of both BBC 4 and BBC Radio 4.
- halfer53 7y ago
  Lol
jen729w 7y ago
Licence fee. 🇬🇧
- uryga 7y ago
  offtopic, but how'd you get an emoji in a HN comment?? (maybe it doesn't get stripped bc the flag is encoded as [U][K], two "letterlike symbols" but still it's the first time i've seen one!)
  - bb123 7y ago
    I guess it is probably because most people are using desktops/laptops to browse HN. I feel like Emoji use on QWERTY keyboards is harder/less common. It is possible though: 🇺🇳
    - uryga 7y ago
      i was referring to the fact that last time i checked, HN stripped emoji. hold on let me check: edit: yeah, my cat got removed :/ I guess they're distinguished by unicode block: the regional indicator letters are "Enclosed Alphanumeric Supplement", and emoji are "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs". still not sure why remove them though
      - bb123 7y ago
        Can you see my UN flag? I also posted one of their easter island faces but that got stripped.
        buckminster 7y ago
        But I had to zoom right in to see which flag it was. So it fails as a flag.
        uryga 7y ago
        actually no, i can't! it just shows "U N" in a bold blue capital letters, which explains some of the confusion i guess. (Android 7.0)
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      On a Mac, if you have the input menu enabled in the menu bar, selecting "Show Emoji & Symbols" will pop open a palette allowing you to put all kinds of things into pretty much any text input. System Preferences → Keyboard → Show input menu in menu bar
    - ToastyMallows 7y ago
      On Windows you can hit Win+; to pull up an emoji keyboard!
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Quite a lot of emoji are allowed on HN. I once saw someone make a post enumerating them all.
rvz 7y ago
> Finally a good use for my license fee! While I agree that no news corporation should ever be censored and should be accessible to all including the "dark-web", the level of clickbait / fake-news level content on the BBC website is getting ridiculous in some areas and contradicts with their duty to be fair, impartial and balanced as the only UK state broadcaster privileged with a royal charter. Apart from the actual World News section, the front page + newsbeat section is completely littered with frivolous cringe-worthy content and memes that isn't worth paying attention to, neither is purchasing the TV license for.
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  They seem to have made it their task to report in depth on every single violent crime in the country. Being from Germany and having never lived in the UK, this is weird to me. For a crime to end up on tagesschau.de (the German equivalent to bbc.co.uk/news ) it needs to be of... well... national interest. This just seems like yellow press, honestly. Or is there something I'm missing? edit: also their "reporting" on anything climate related is amazing. It's no wonder that extinction rebellion, a movement originating in the UK, has as the first demand to "tell the truth". At first I was confused because climate change in my media consumption was a regularly occurring topic. But then I checked the bbc website. See [1] for a screenshot. This is at a time, mind you, when the whole of Europe was shattering temperature records left and right, and Greenland was melting. And they choose to report on a thumb wrestling tournament. [1]: http://muchmuch.coffee:8989/blobs/get/&Jwu6gu4Ub33VBWbmz6YbTXM85jPmXtBPL8/F0Uhiy9M=.sha256 http://muchmuch.coffee:8989/blobs/get/&Jwu6gu4Ub33VBWbmz6YbT...
  - amigiac 7y ago
    They say the BBC bend to the wishes of the current government, they seem in recent years to be bending towards the Daily Mail, using fear-mongering to attract clicks and viewers, ignoring climate change protests to not put off car owners. Joining in with the newspapers by smearing anyone who speaks against the Tory party.
    - goatinaboat 7y ago
Mobius01 7y ago
I’m very grateful for all paying the license fees. Through the BBCs language education programs I was able to learn English and it changed the course of my life. So thank you!

sanxiyn 7y ago

You can also visit facebookcorewwwi.onion.

RandomGuyDTB 7y ago
Possibly the most famous darkweb URL.
- blaser-waffle 7y ago
  I feel like Dread Pirate Roberts would have something to say about that.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    I think GP means that facebook spent a lot of CPU cycles getting an onion address that is so human-readable/memorable; I don't remember what the old Silk Road's address was but I think I'd remember if it were silkroadcorewwwi.onion
akavel 7y ago
Are you using it? does it work? when I tried to use it some long time ago, it was unusably broken (asked me to validate my account by recognizing photos of some friends, but each photo was showing as a blank white rectangle).
nestofet 7y ago
Belenarnau7

nyolfen 7y ago

i’m not sure why. if someone is already using the tor network, presumably they could use it to bypass censorship to access the clearnet bbc site.

Xophmeister 7y ago
From TFA: While the Tor browser can be used to access the regular version of the BBC News website, using the .onion site has additional benefits. "Onion services take load off scarce exit nodes, preserve end-to-end encryption [and] the self-authenticating domain name resists spoofing," explained Prof Steven Murdoch, a cyber-security expert from University College London.
oskenevd 7y ago
Because so much of the bbc website is http, today, in 2019. At least you now get TLS between the browser and the bbc server. Accessing bbc over Tor normally leaks cleartext http to the exit nodes.
- toby- 7y ago
  The vast majority of the BBC's services use HTTPS nowadays, including BBC News, BBC Bitesize, Sounds/Radio, CBBC and CBeebies, etc. Only pre-2010 news stories are HTTP. The only other parts that remain HTTP (that I've seen) are certain archived content, e.g. the older Learning[0] and Languages[1] portals. [0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/coursesearch/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/coursesearch/ [1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/
  - Sami_Lehtinen 7y ago
    Here's fresh article which refuses to be served over HTTPS. get "https://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghostly-wrecked-ships" https://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghos... Location: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghostly-wrecked-ships http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghost... BBC is one of very few sites on my HTTP allowed list. By default I've disabled HTTP completely.

_Understated_ 7y ago

Not a fan of the clickbait title... Seems a bit unfair to equate wanting to protect privacy with the dark web where people associate it with drugs and paedophiles and whatnot. Very clickbaity from the BBC.

toby- 7y ago
Most people understand Tor to be the 'dark web', so I wouldn't call it clickbait. Hell, it is the dark web. It's you who's wrongly associating it with paedophilia and drugs (both amply available on the 'clearnet') IMO, which does quite a disservice to attempts to promote Tor to the newly privacy-conscious. 'Dark' means hidden, not 'evil'.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  You can nitpick all you want but both the "dark" and "hidden" words sound sinister to a lot of people.
- _Understated_ 7y ago
  Straight away in the article they spell it out and make the link between Tor and the dark web: > The Tor browser is privacy-focused software used to access the dark web Yes it is. But that's the worst thing it's used for. It's like saying 12-gauge shotguns are used for bank robberies... Ok, I'm stretching the point but it's needlessly putting the association of privacy focused browsing using Tor with the nasty shit that some people do with it. Edit: I realise my understanding of The Dark Web was incorrect so this argument is invalidated now but I'll leave it up.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Yes it is. But that's the worst thing it's used for. The "dark" in dark web doesn't mean "bad", it's darkness to prying eyes. If you buy drugs on the dark web, it's the dark web. If you read literature on the dark web that your government doesn't want you to read, it's the dark web as well. The negative connotations you're associating with it are what this step by the BBC will help reduce: pointing out that the criminal use isn't the primary use of the dark web. Privacy is.

andrewaylett 7y ago

I know there are good reasons why it's not fully secure, but I'd really like to be able to access `.onion` addresses in my regular browser over TOR and everything else directly as usual. In _this_ I'm not over-worried about the risk of deanonymisation as my aim is on one hand access to resources I don't have access to now and on the other hand legitimisation of TOR as something that anyone could reasonably use, even (or especially!) if they have "nothing to hide".

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
elagost 7y ago
The way to do that is just to use Tor Browser as your regular browser.
- ivankolev 7y ago
  I know it is based on Firefox, do they keep updated with upstream?
  - Santosh83 7y ago
    Yes, they base Tor browser upon the latest Firefox ESR so it has the same security fixes as that...
- Phlogi 7y ago
  No, because the Tor Browser sends all traffic through the tor network and exit nodes.
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    Why is that bad, per se? In practice some sites drop Tor connections, and localisations come through wrong, but that doesn't seem to be why you said "no".
    - 7y ago

mxuribe 7y ago

It certainly seems like they're doing this with good intentions. If so, the BBC is to be applauded!

farummi 7y ago

BBC World News has a similar purpose as Voice of America (VOA) and Russia Today (RT). The purpose is to deliver the viewpoint of the UK to other countries, such as Iran, Russia, China.

Zenst 7y ago
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/bbc/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/history/story/2007/02/070123_html_1990s.shtml http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/history/story/2007/02/0701...
- ArchieLeach 7y ago
  The BBC is quite subtle. It's not fake news and what they report is factual, but the choice of what facts to report makes it crystal clear that they do have an agenda. A current example: Hongkong. They have headline reporting every time there is a protest while other protests in other countries, and arguably much more significant protests, barely get a mention. This is not a coincidence. Edit: A lot of the replies to this comment try to rationalise. This is being willfully blind. Noam Chomsky has written a lot about the issue of raltive importance of reporting in order to manipulate public opinion. This is exactly what is happening because it should be obvious to everyone that there is a campaign against China ongoing.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    Hasn't the HongKong protests been going on for a while and with changing dynamics in protests and response. BBC reported many protests, is there one in particular that should of been more reported upon that springs to mind - for me, nope. https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=protests https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=protests Sure choice of facts and style can and does show a middle-left bias, but as for agenda. If it is that crystal clear, then what is it! I will say though, the trend of media outlets to report opinions of interviewers as news and for the populus to take those avenues of news and run with them as facts, has been something that plays out upon social media. This then as we have seen, is used by news outlets as sources of news (ala Tweets have becomes news sources now). This does create the potential for massive feedback loops. But then, no media outlet seems immune to that.

dev_north_east 7y ago

Don't really see the point of this and am tbh slightly irked at a wastage of my licence fee.

that_lurker 7y ago
This allows anyone that has access to TOR to read BBC. Many countries might block outside news organizations.
- dev_north_east 7y ago
  Yes I understand that. 1 - Can the same not be achieved via VPN usage? 2 - Can TOR browsers not already access the BBC in the "clearnet"? 3 - Why do I, as a UK resident, have to provide money so that someone in Vietnam can access our state news?
  - hkt 7y ago
    Soft power. So people around the world see things our way. The likelihood of this being immensely costly is near nil, by the way.
  - sambe 7y ago
    The license fee is not the BBC's only source of funding. Its worldwide operations are generally profitable.
    - rvz 7y ago
      That's true, most broadcasters have to also bid for broadcasting contracts which give them a-lot of revenue too if they win. However, UK audiences tend to question the TV license if the BBC does anything out of their duty. But non-UK audiences will see ads on the site that will eventually be clicked on. So what does the BBC do? Increase more click-bait articles on newsbeat, entertainment, brexit sections to make up for their lost UK audience that are now on other news or streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, etc.
  - 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

beokop 7y ago

I’m getting an Internal Server Error at the Tor site, I guess this means it’s more popular than they expected?

class4behavior 7y ago

Since no one posted that, yet: Tor relies on the size the of its network to counteract blocks, prevent take overs, and naturally ensure stability as well as performance. You can either donate to various groups running Tor servers, the developers, or take part on your own. https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Tor https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.torservers.net/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://www.dfri.se/donera/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://nos-oignons.net/ https://donate.torproject.org/ https://donate.torproject.org/ Also, as a side note, in countries where Tor access is actively inhibited, users may need to rely on bridges. https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://bridges.torproject.org/ https://blog.torproject.org/how-use-meek-pluggable-transport https://blog.torproject.org/how-use-meek-pluggable-transport https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/

blaser-waffle 7y ago
Is it worth it to donate, or to just pool a little cash and start your own? Like, how do I know any of those links aren't the NSA? I ask because I have 5-6 Raspberry Pis, a couple retired Supermicro boxes, and old Cisco gear that isn't doing much...
- LeifCarrotson 7y ago
  Donations are probably better, because while that hardware is helpful, it's the ISP connections that are hard to come by. If you host a Tor exit node on your home network connection, Comcast is likely going to shut down your service for abuse/TOS violations. Having some rack space in a datacenter is far more valuable and better supported by donations.
  - okcando 7y ago
    How does this use case differ from (legal) distributed file sharing, like Bittorrent, which people do at home all the time?
    - solarkraft 7y ago

bloogsy 7y ago

Hooray, now you can get pro-Tory bias no matter where you are!

movieswebsite 7y ago

https://tezmovieswebsite.blogspot.com/2019/10/love-sex-aur-dhokha-2019-full-movie.html https://tezmovieswebsite.blogspot.com/2019/10/love-sex-aur-d...

breadandcrumbel 7y ago

As far as I know, TOR doesn't work well in China

LinuxBender 7y ago
Correct. Every time a new version / protocol is released, it works for a little while and then they adapt their firewall to block it.
- cnThrowaway 7y ago
  Here is my idea to fight The Great Firewall: Embed banned content in "normal" https websites like this one. The content can either be static like mirrors of banned sites (wikipedia, BBC and the tor website). It would be at secret locations. The site should randomly pick a few of it's Chinese users. When they visit public pages, they will be redirected to the secret locations. (With a welcome message). It will appeal to apolitical Chinese, because they will feel they are unraveling secrets. It will be hard for the Chinese government to clamp down: They will struggle to identify these websites and when they shut them down, they will hurt their own industries.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    I think most Chinese - even apolitical Chinese - will think it's a government-inserted purity test, and immediately leave. If it becomes successful, then China will make that fear real, and start running the same thing themselves.

zaphod420 7y ago

Ethereum has contract call ENS (Ethereum Name Service). It's kind of like a decentralized DNS. People are starting to use that to create .eth domain names that point to .onion sites. https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/list-of-ens-names-that-resolve-to-tor-onion-websites-99140a4c674f https://medium.com/the-ethereum-name-service/list-of-ens-nam...

solarkraft 7y ago
Why is this of interest?
- zaphod420 7y ago
  .onion urls are difficult to remember. ENS provides human readable names that point to .onion urls.
blotter_paper 7y ago
I think DNS is one of the top two most appropriate uses for blockchains. Besides the auctions and the TLD, what are the tradeoffs you're aware of between ENS and Namecoin? There's a part of me that feels like having One True Blockchain for everything sounds cool, but I also think Ethereum might be overkill for what is essentially a key-value store. Is there a formal ENS whitepaper with all the relevant high-level details in one document that my google-fu is failing to find, or are these web docs and the github code the best starting point right now? https://docs.ens.domains/ https://docs.ens.domains/

helios893 7y ago

BTW NYtimes has been doing this for a while. https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york-times-as-a-tor-onion-service-e0d0b67b7482 https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york... https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/ https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/

blotter_paper 7y ago
Lulz, what good is a paywalled tor site? Does NYT accept crypto, or do you have to get throwaway plastic to pay them pseudonymously?
- clubm8 7y ago
  Is it paywalled? Maybe your exit node was used to scrape? I don't read NYT much but when I've checked out the .onion such as today I've had no issue reading articles.
  - tobias2014 7y ago
    I'm getting "Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.", then click on the "Create a free account button" to be finally faced with "This action is not supported over Onion yet, sorry.".
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    The concept of exit nodes does not apply to .onions.
privdev 7y ago
Yet does not allow you to sign up anonymously. I'm still not sure why you need to host a tor site unless your server is in a censored country.

zimbatm 7y ago

Imagine if CloudFlare or another CDN provider were to automatically public websites on Tor. This would be huge to drive legitimate traffic into the system. It should be trivial to publish your content on Tor as well as the clear web.

jgrahamc 7y ago
You mean like the Cloudflare Onion Service that we launched a year ago: https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/ It performs an automatic upgrade to use the .onion from Cloudflare if you use TBB (and Brave).
- StavrosK 7y ago
  I've always wanted to use this (and enabled it on all my sites, e.g. www.stavros.io), but it has never worked for me, I can always see the alt-svc header in the response (using TBB 9.0).
- zimbatm 7y ago
  wow nice!
hamilyon2 7y ago
Someone always mentions that it is already easier to publish website via tor because you don't need ip address and dns record.

aykutcan 7y ago

I am annoyed by the clickbait title. it is like calling knife as murder weapon.

eyeinthepyramid 7y ago
Dark web isn't inherently negative though, is it? It's not like they called it pedo-web.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago
  It's very negative.
  - apecat 7y ago
    Yeah. It's a term we've got to live with though: it's too widely used in media. That's why news and public service actors with global ambitions launching onion services is likely a huge net gain in the long run.
  - GoblinSlayer 7y ago
    Think about it as dark side of the moon - an invisible place.
  - blotter_paper 7y ago
    I agree that it's bad optics, but personally I think it sounds shway. If we're gonna live in a dystopian future where we have to evade omnipresent government surveillance using illegal* code, it might as well sound like something out of an '80s sci-fi novel or a '90s anime. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ *Currently illegal in some jurisdictions, more coming soon!
justinmchase 7y ago
They did put "dark web" in scare quotes to soften the blow a little.

crusty511 7y ago

> The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. Bit ironic given that the influence of the government at the BBC.

keithnoizu 7y ago

Forgive the useless quip, but it's a shame Jimmy Savile couldn't be alive to see his two worlds collide like this.

EasyTiger_ 7y ago
Perfect.

abstractbarista 7y ago

Many of you with homelabs ought to check out how to run a Tor relay or bridge. It's been fun setting mine up, and after a while I started getting lots of traffic! No data cap on a symmetric fiber connection, so I might as well share the love!

tenebrisalietum 7y ago
This is different from an exit node, right?
- bureaucrat 7y ago
  Don’t worry. You won’t get a subpoena or get a surprise visit from you-know-what. Tor relays just relays data, while exit nodes relay data from tor to Internet.
skissane 7y ago
Once upon a time, I tried running a relay at home. Certain websites started blocking my IP - their operators wanted to block exit nodes, but indiscriminately blocked all IPs from the Tor directory, both exit nodes and relay nodes. At that point, I stopped doing it.
- throwaway87378 7y ago
  Tor bridges do not have this problem, do not consume a lot of bandwidth, and are very useful for people who need to circumvent firewalls. I have been running one for years without any issues. The Tor Project is currently looking for more volunteers to run bridges: https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-internet https://blog.torproject.org/run-tor-bridges-defend-open-inte...

cyphar 7y ago

I'm confused why they're running a v2 onion address -- v3 has many benefits in terms of privacy and DoS resistance. I get that the onion addresses are longer, but you can run both in parallel.

steeleduncan 7y ago

Potentially I am misunderstanding how Tor's onion routing works, but according to https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html https://metrics.torproject.org/networksize.html there are about 6000 tor relays right now. Surely if some well funded organisation (Eve) were to install a similar number of relays itself, then it is reasonably likely that for a given user a packet would eventually travel across relays solely owned by Eve, and at that point Eve could map a Tor address to a physical IP? Operating 6000 nodes in a manner unlikely to cause suspicion , and correlating packets across those nodes, is a massive undertaking, but it seems that it would be well within the means of e.g. NSA. Would this work, or am I missing something fundamental about how Tor works?

xvector 7y ago
I believe this would work, and is one of the weak points of the ecosystem. I wonder what the impact of spinning up 6K relays in AWS across the globe would be like. I would say that spinning up 6K instances would be affordable for even small companies.
- steeleduncan 7y ago
  Yes, the cost wouldn't be prohibitive. It is not hard to see how it could be profitable for a small security company to do this and sell the information on.
- noident 7y ago
  You can't just spin up 6k new relays and take over the Tor network without somebody noticing. The network is actively monitored for sybil attacks, and it takes 2+ weeks before a new node is "trusted" with significant traffic, giving network monitors plenty of time to blacklist you. What's going to kill Tor is a global passive adversary, meaning someone with perfect visibility of all traffic going in and out of Tor nodes by tapping network infrastructure and correlating at the endpoints. I'm sure the NSA is working on this. They couldn't do it in 2013, but what could they have accomplished in the 6 years since the Snowden leaks? It's also possible to use machine learning to "fingerprint" encrypted blobs entering guard nodes and correlate them with websites (even onion services!), although it gets less feasible as the set of potential websites increases.

throwaway8491 7y ago

Some of BBC News' .onion neighbors are forced to constantly rotate their URLs to evade DDoS attacks (notably Empire Market). Admins constantly publish new PGP-signed links to https://dark.fail https://dark.fail . DDoS attackers then scrape this site, shift their attacks. Sites stay online, but users are trained to expect URLs to constantly change. This has resulted in a huge spike in phishing attacks. Tor hidden services are notoriously difficult to protect from DDoS attacks due to its code being mostly single-threaded. Build 5000 circuits to any darknet site, max out one core on the server, and you take it offline. Cheers to BBC for this great step forward for privacy. Hopefully their traffic surges to bring more attention to .onion scaling problems.

clubm8 7y ago
My pet theory is that these DDOS attacks are not just other merchants. I believe state actors are DDOSing to force traffic through nodes they control to deanonymize traffic.
- bashallah 7y ago
  Flood certain gates to ease monitoring of specific nodes. Easy ROI
badrabbit 7y ago
Can't you do IP load balancing and run multiple Tor processes to handle different circuits?
cyphar 7y ago
While it doesn't solve the problem entirely, onionbalance[1] does mean that you can have more than one server handle traffic. There's also IP load balancing. [1]: https://github.com/DonnchaC/onionbalance https://github.com/DonnchaC/onionbalance

statusquoantefa 7y ago

To be clear, they're talking about the un-intellectual dark web: they aren't yet willing to take the risk featuring in-band IDW viewpoints on their pages or airwaves. Probably, in the face of trends like Brexit and a sense of their declining popularity, this is phase one of preparing to take their resistance underground if they have to.

knolax 7y ago
From Wikipedia on IDW: "The intellectual dark web (IDW) is a neologism coined by American mathematician Eric Weinstein, and popularized in a 2018 editorial by Bari Weiss. The term refers to a group of public personalities who oppose what they see as the dominance of progressive identity politics and political correctness in the media and academia." Seems like the conventional usage of the term "Dark Web" predates your usage, and is more relevant given that we're on a tech forum.

lacampbell 7y ago

There's a bit of irony in the UK state run broadcaster doing this, giving the UKs poor track record on freedom of speech.

tootahe45 7y ago

I don't see the point of this, nobody is censoring politically correct speech. Aren't they literally govt funded too?

LilBytes 7y ago
China and Russia would both like a word with you.
- sacrificedcapon 7y ago
  I think you missed his point. Neither china nor russia censor "politically correct" speech. Of course their view of "politically correct" is different from ours and others. Europe, Islamic world, Africa, etc all protect "politically correct" speech and censor "politically incorrect" speech. Sadly, in the US, extremists ( particularly the left ) are leading the charge to censor "politically incorrect" speech.
  - Twixes 7y ago
    Hardly are there any "extremist" leftists in the US (never heard of any advocating for a revolution) and any calls for censorship come from a tiny minority of Tumblr–like social justice warriors.
    - sacrificedcapon 7y ago
      Agreed that the number of extremist leftists are small in the US. Unfortunately, many of those "Tumblr-like social justice warriors" work in the academia, media and government and wield disproportionate power. And if you haven't heard of any talk of revolution, you must have lived in seclusion somewhere in the woods and missed out on 3 years of post-Trump hysteria. Lucky you.
      - Twixes 7y ago
        Where is the seizing of the means of production? Even nationalization of companies is a no–no. Political discourse is radically liberal economically in the US (thanks, Mr. Reagan) so there's really little leftism in the left.

spoown 7y ago

Excellent initiative... would to see more of these...