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Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-we

Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself. That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.

Dylan16807 2y ago
> Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry Second class how? I open the tor browser, I paste the link, I go there.
- amingilani 2y ago
  Even simpler, advertise your onion domain by including a Onion-Location header in the clear-net site’s response. The Tor Browser automatically detects and offers to redirect you there. No need to memorize the onion domain.
  - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
    This was the original purpose of the alt-svc[1] header, although it's rarely used for that purpose and instead used for upgrading clients to QUIC. [1] https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor-and-alt-svc/ https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor...
  - dizhn 2y ago
    That sounds like a pretty nice place to add malware to a site once it's hacked and avoid detection.
mktemp-d 2y ago
You can't just lay out a supposed fact that 99% of users don't care about speed without providing some sort of citation...
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  I think you misread, I read it as 99% of users don't care about anonymity
tga_d 2y ago
We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc. I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.

Dylan16807 2y ago

> Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry Second class how? I open the tor browser, I paste the link, I go there.

amingilani 2y ago
Even simpler, advertise your onion domain by including a Onion-Location header in the clear-net site’s response. The Tor Browser automatically detects and offers to redirect you there. No need to memorize the onion domain.
- supriyo-biswas 2y ago
  This was the original purpose of the alt-svc[1] header, although it's rarely used for that purpose and instead used for upgrading clients to QUIC. [1] https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor-and-alt-svc/ https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor...
- dizhn 2y ago
  That sounds like a pretty nice place to add malware to a site once it's hacked and avoid detection.

mktemp-d 2y ago

You can't just lay out a supposed fact that 99% of users don't care about speed without providing some sort of citation...

jazzyjackson 2y ago
I think you misread, I read it as 99% of users don't care about anonymity

tga_d 2y ago

We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc. I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.