Talk:Tor

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That list of "safe sites"

Do we uh... need that list? It seems a bit silly. In general the page kinda is really low quality and is too focused on the technical aspects of Tor more than it is on the sociological impact it has. This doesn't really make it all that missional and we probably should either prune most of this page to be a bit more short brief about what actually matters (possibly move NSA stuff to subpages, that is interesting but kinda makes the main article messy if presented as is).

We're more professional than this. Might decide to take the entire page to the shovel at some point but anyone else is free to fix this disaster of a page up. Techpriest (talk) 16:22, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Tor is slow section

Who or what is 'arma' - and is its/their surname 'geddon'?

If you are up to something dubious there might well be simpler ways of pursuing your activities. ('I could murder a [foodstuff]' and any number of crime stories and authors will skew any monitoring - and 'Let's do as we said .../words that have different meanings in different languages' could disguise actual malign intent.) Anna Livia (talk) 14:17, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

"list of safe onion sites" is obsolete

The majority of the links (all the 16 char long URLs) are no longer used. As a result, only the ProPublica and DuckDuckGo links actually can be used to go to the sites. ^{— Unsigned, by: 49.2.197.196 / talk}

Major overhaul

Let's be honest, the article in its previous state was a mess. I've rewritten it from scratch, hopefully avoiding many of the problems the old one had. I hope I didn't massively misinterpret the "be bold" principle by doing this. Feel free to revert if you find it appropriate.

Here is some of the more glaring issues I've attempted to fix:

• The "Tor is slow" section was completely unnecessary. This is not a guide to technical details about Tor, nor a user guide. We can provide pointers to help people get started, but whether Tor is slow or not is completely irrelevant.
• I don't oppose the idea of having a list of onion sites, but the old one was outdated, so I removed it entirely. After all, onion addresses don't have an official distribution channel. It is supposed to be a word of mouth thing, so if you trust RationalWiki, and RationalWiki is telling you that <x> owns <y> onion address, then you have one additional source to trust <y> onion address as belonging to <x>. Additionally, many onion sites that are mirrors of clearnet sites opt to use the Onion-Location header to distribute their onion, and if they're using HTTPS you'll be able to automatically trust that onion thanks to the CA trust model (which I personally dislike, but oh well). (Of course that's on the clearnet side of things, HTTPS is completely redundant for an onion service (since the traffic never leaves the Tor network, it remains encrypted throughout). Another problem with the original article in my opinion).

• That's it! All other .onion sites are either scams, personal sites, stings,adverts for guns, drugs, and goat porn for cheap $bitcoin$ prices.

  I'm not sure how sarcastic that line is meant to be, but that is at best a massive oversimplification.
• I believe the last three sections are a bit redundant. The "Stop liking cool features" section is simply outdated (Flash is no more) and either way this is, as previously mentioned, not a user guide—I do provide links to good opsec practices, but there's no reason to elaborate on them in the article. A similar thing can be said about the "Tor doesn't make you invincible" section. Also, torrenting through Tor is not only tricky but very dickish, since you're taking up enormous amounts of bandwidth for an otherwise decentralized network like a torrent swarm. The "Surveillance" section is only tangentially related to Tor.

It is by no means perfect, but I do believe it is an improvement over what we had before. I'm still not happy with the phrasing in a lot of places, and perhaps it would be nice to have an illustration of onion circuits in the relevant section. Feedback is highly appreciated. moonsheep (talk) 20:19, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Not much to say, only that this is much better that what we had previously. Good work! As for the list of onion sites, we didn't have many sites listed, but of those we had, only archive.is was outdated (had the old v2 address). Rabbitseatcarrots (talk) 20:44, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Ah good to know, I was a bit scared at first this would be rejected. Yeah, about the onion sites: I do feel like we could include a few of the more popular clearnet sites that decided to make an onion mirror. Twitter, Facebook, riseup, a bunch of newspapers, Pornhub, DuckDuckGo and of course the Tor Project itself come to mind. moonsheep (talk) 20:55, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Also, since they're pretty central to the whole censorship circumvention thing (probably the main reason RW should care about Tor in the first place) we probably should also mention bridges. moonsheep (talk) 20:57, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Will try to write something about the bridges. Rabbitseatcarrots (talk) 21:17, 11 September 2022 (UTC)

Freenet/Hyphanet forkiness

I previously added an edit to the alternatives to Tor section, as Wikipedia now says Freenet is called Hyphanet. I retracted this edit since Freenet is now Hyphanet, Locutus is now Freenet, project forks happened and my brain hurts... but the section needs updating, methinks, and I feel too nooby TheJessieKirk 11:27, 1 May 2024 (GMT)