3 ms·

What's with the random characters in the Tor URL? Are Tor URLs always like that? www.bbcnewsd73hkzno2ini43t4gblxvycyac5aw4gnv7t2rccijh7745uqd.onion/

• phaer 5y ago
  Yes, it's an encoded public key, identifying the service. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion#Format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.onion#Format even "bbcnews" is part of that key, probably brute-forced until that prefix was found.
  • jffry 5y ago
    It must've been brute-forced. According to this one old brute forcer I found [1] but have not thoroughly vetted, it would've been one CPU-day of effort on 2012-era hardware [1] https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot
    • jffry 5y ago
      Adding onto this: I was able to use https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o to generate my own v3 address with chosen 7-character prefix in just under 1 hour on my i7-8700k I imagine an implementation that leverages a GPU could go much faster.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]