The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service

https://open.nytimes.com/https-open-nytimes-com-the-new-york-times-as-a-tor-onion-service-e0d0b67b7482

by alecmuffett • 9 years ago

878 192 9 years ago

open.nytimes.com

Bishonen88• 9 years ago

So is it now "guaranteed", that TOR is secure? And how many "guarantees" does one need in order to be "guaranteed" security whilst browsing?

[...]and they provide additional guarantees that readers are connected securely to our website.[...]

gipp• 9 years ago

Are you just nitpicking the difference between the phrase "provide additional guarantees" and the verb "guarantee"? Why?

So is it now "guaranteed", that TOR is secure?

Your quote does not imply that

alecmuffett• 9 years ago

Tor crypto guarantees an E2E connection to an entity possessing a key which matches the onion address which you sought to access. That's a benefit over DNS/TCP/BGP :-)

socceroos• 9 years ago

Disable Javascript. Enabling it makes you traceable. Run a Temporary profile in Firefox - otherwise cached images will make you traceable. Connect from your neighbors wifi (the further from your home the better, really) with a spoofed MAC address running from a write-locked USB live distro - this ensures you're protected from the unknown unknowns.

aeorgnoieang• 9 years ago

Run a Temporary profile in Firefox

What're the equivalent or similar features in other browsers (e.g. Chrome)? Incognito mode?

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

Or just use the Tor Browser - ideally with the High security setting. Other browsers don't have the same anti fingerprinting and first party isolation defenses.

pvdebbe• 9 years ago

Then again, with JS disabled your browser fingerprint gets a lot more specific unless your UA is a scrawler bot.

gressquel• 9 years ago

Its not secure. "Everyone" knows that. Everytime a drug market is taken down or a pedophile ring is busted, the investigators from FBI always claim it was some dubious mistake from the admin whic lead to it. But we all know they have discovered a vulnurability in the TOR protocol but won't disclose it.

Safe browsing guys

//edit: if you want extra security. Launch TOR from a remote desktop. And I am not talking about the ones you buy from known VPN providers like NordicVPN or amazon web services.

typon• 9 years ago

But we all know they have discovered a vulnurability in the TOR protocol but won't disclose it.

Can you provide evidence for this claim? I'm a huge conspiracy nut, this has me excited.

staticassertion• 9 years ago

I guess I'm not everyone. I'd bet that the majority of the 'busts' are due to:

a) Infiltrating chats where people are more likely to share sensitive information / trust the people they're talking to

b) Poor configurations/ setups on either the client or server (client browser bundle has noscript, but it's not on the strictest settings, js is enabled iirc)

c) Exploitation of client or server due to out of date versions, things like that

Historically I think it's always fallen into one of these cases - and not just what the FBI etc say publicly but we've seen these exploits ITW. I wouldn't be surprised if the NSA and other agencies have the power to deanonymize TOR users but if it were trivial why is the majority of TOR traffic still going towards illegal content? Last I read (a paper a year ago) TOR is still primarily all about drugs, followed by child pornography (mostly drugs though iirc). If they can track all of these people by breaking TOR completely... why don't they?

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

//edit: if you want extra security. Launch TOR from a remote desktop. And I am not talking about the ones you buy from known VPN providers like NordicVPN or amazon web services.

No, if you want extra security use Qubes OS with Whonix (it comes with it by default) for isolating the Tor process in a single VM and the browser in another - thereby prohibiting any leaks, unless an adversary has a VM escape RCE.

tresp2• 9 years ago

lmao, this is complete BS. sure it's not perfect and some nodes get compromised. no nation or three letter agency has cracked tor. prove me wrong

woodandsteel3• 9 years ago

But we all know they have discovered a vulnurability in the TOR protocol but won't disclose it.

Really? Perhaps you could explain how every single one of us found out it is true? Maybe every single one of us has a friend working in the NSA who was willing to tell us, even though he could go to jail for giving away such a secret?

Or maybe you are just making things up.

jstanley2• 9 years ago

Using Tor is more secure than not using Tor, no matter how much FUD people try to spread about it.

jameskegel• 9 years ago

This may not be the whole solution but it is a step in the right direction. Kudos to NYT for attention to this subset of readers.

belorn2• 9 years ago

It is. Overlay networks has a very expensive overhead, but it is one of the few ways that networks can be updated to modern views on security threats and privacy without getting ISP to change their hardware and software. I am in particular hopeful that we might see a future where tor will simply be a available tool in the general network stack, enabling private end-to-end without exist nodes.

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

Overlay networks has a very expensive overhead

Single onion services are a thing now for quiet some time actually: https://web.archive.org/web/20161219230314/https://blog.torp... (had to use archive.org since images are broken on their blog currently)

ryanlol3• 9 years ago

Why is this a step in the right direction? Having a .onion service provides essentially zero benefit without a hidden backend.

People wanting to access NYT site via Tor, can just navigate to https://www.nytimes.com/ and it'll be significantly faster than the .onion equivalent.

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

People wanting to access NYT site via Tor, can just navigate to https://www.nytimes.com/ and it'll be significantly faster than the .onion equivalent.

This isn't true, exits are currently in short supply. And onion services don't use exits, so it will result in a faster speed, especially since they may have made it as a single onion service[1].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20161219230314/https://blog.torp...

nottorp2• 9 years ago

Hmm don't you have to pay to access the full newspaper? How does that mix with Tor anonymity?

greiskul• 9 years ago

Haven't tested to see how they are doing, but that's kinda orthogonal to using tor. Standard cryptography like https uses is meant so any eavesdroppers don't know WHAT you are talking about. But they still know that Alice is talking with Bob. Onion routing, that tor uses, is meant to so eavesdroppers also don't know who is talking to whom. But that's on the eavesdroppers part. If Alice and Bob are talking completely privately, it's completely fine if they are exchanging all the information they want between themselves. The big idea is that attackers don't know what you are doing.

Tor can also hide where Bob's servers are, but not sure if the New York Times would need that bit.

nottorp2• 9 years ago

Ah right - i was thinking of hiding from the US government, which can get the identity of subscribers directly from NYT.

I forgot there are other governments too... shame, I'm not even from the US.

blfr3• 9 years ago

They show the countdown of remaining articles but they have virtually no way of identifying your browser over Tor so all you need is clear cookies and continue to browse anonymously.

underwoodley• 9 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can clear your cookies on a normal browser and reset the number of remaining articles for the month.

bertil• 9 years ago

The two things are not directly dependent: for instance, Facebook allows you to connect to your account through Tor. You still have a separate individual authentication (email & password, 2FA) once the connection is established. I believe I have a paying NYT account so I might try if you are interested.

It’s possible that Tor makes it harder to enforce the rule that you can’t read more than X articles per month (which I believe is enforced using cookies and your IP address) but at this early stage, I’m not sure that’s key: people who know how to use Tor generally can easily go around that limitation on https.

If too many people use that loophole to read without a subscription, that means NYTimes would have been instrumental in making Tor mainstream. That would be a major achievement in itself. Enforcing similar consumption limits through Tor would probably be rather experimental, but sounds hardly difficult (especially with the goodwill NYTimes would have most likely gained from Tor developers & supporters).

koolba• 9 years ago

It’s possible that Tor makes it harder to enforce the rule that you can’t read more than X articles per month (which I believe is enforced using cookies and your IP address) but at this early stage, I’m not sure that’s key: people who know how to use Tor generally can easily go around that limitation on https.

Their current X (which I think is 10) articles per month limit is enforced via cookies. If you're like me and have your browser set to automatically clear all cookies and persistent state on close, you never even notice it exists.

animeseinfeld• 9 years ago

The paywall exists on the NYT's onion site as well. But a certain number of articles -- I think 10 -- are free to read each month.

unsignedint• 9 years ago

That would still contradict anonymity though. They can't track users by IP address or cookies (if Tor browser is used... it is transient for the session) and having people register means they are likely have to come out of anonymity. If they do manage to register one from anonymous throwaway address, then it essentially make paywall moot...

hollander• 9 years ago

There you login like normal. Tor can be used to hide from the website owners, and from the network owners between you and the website. If you don't mind that the website knows who you are, you login and identify yourself to them, without letting the network know what you do.

blfr3• 9 years ago

And they're using an Extended Validation certificate from DigiCert for it

    CN = nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    OU = Technology
    O = The New York Times Company
    Object Identifier (2 5 4 15) = Private Organization

along with some other addresses

    DNS Name: nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: graylady3jvrrxbe.onion
    DNS Name: *.graylady3jvrrxbe.onion
    DNS Name: *.dev.graylady3jvrrxbe.onion
    DNS Name: *.stg.graylady3jvrrxbe.onion
    DNS Name: *.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.api.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.api.dev.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.api.stg.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.blogs.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.blogs.stg.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.blogs5.stg.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.dev.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.dev.blogs.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.newsdev.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.prd.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.sbx.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.stg.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.stg.blogs.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: *.stg.newsdev.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: www.bestsellers.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion
    DNS Name: www.homedelivery.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion

Izmaki• 9 years ago

What does this mean in regular human terms?

blfr3• 9 years ago

You get a green bar to know you're connecting to the NYT and the cert is issued for many additional addresses showing large coverage of their services and hinting at future use.

0xfeba• 9 years ago

EV certs provide more than just encryption that a DV (domain validation) cert provides. DV just checks to make sure the domain is under control of whoever is asking for the cert.

EV ensures that the entity (person, corp, org, whatever) is in fact in control of the domain and is who they say they are.

belorn2• 9 years ago

Extended Validation certificate is when a company go to a CA and provide a bunch of business documents and legal proof that they really own the company behind a name. Its not a technical aspect but human lawyer <-> human lawyer that establish a certificate. At the end if the validation is successful, the company get a technical signed document that in browsers shows up as a green lock and the name in green next to the URL.

andimm• 9 years ago

I liked this post on EV certificates:

https://www.troyhunt.com/on-the-perceived-value-ev-certs-cas...

nailer2• 9 years ago

EV is mandatory for .onion HTTPS certificates - since onion hashes (the 'domain name') are even less meaningful as a form of identity than regular domains.

There's a couple of other differences with .onion certs too: https://certsimple.com/help/tor-support

dublinben2• 9 years ago

This is incorrect. Onion domain addresses already provide the same level of confidence as a DV certificate, because they are a public key of the server you are connecting to. There would be no additional value in issuing a DV certificate for an .onion domain.

feelin_googley• 9 years ago

https://crt.sh/?id=240277340

Ajedi329• 9 years ago

Any idea why it was revoked?

JoshTriplett2• 9 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if it's a good idea to brute-force these kinds of "vanity" onion prefixes. Take a look at the addresses used in http://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/hidden-service-phishin... ; they brute-forced the same prefix with a different suffix. Would anyone really notice?

chrisfosterelli• 9 years ago

If they didn't use vanity names, then people would only remember the first/last few random characters and the phishing scheme could very well still work, just it'd be less readable for visitors. I don't think we can assume that if all the characters were random they would remember them all better.

corobo2• 9 years ago

Can you CNAME with onion domains? For example

onion.nytimes.com CNAME nytimes3xbfgragh.onion

Edit to clarify - more a technical pondering than a solution to anything

pavement2• 9 years ago

If you're that easily phished, why are you using TOR at all?

You aren't being attentive enough for high risk activities. You lack proper verification channels, to confirm authenticity, which matters in this context. You lack the situational awareness to proceed safely.

Admit that you might not be cut out for what it takes to maintain a secure posture on the internet, if that's what gets you. Just stop pretending to try.

ryanlol3• 9 years ago

It is a bit silly considering you can trivially brute onion addresses consisting entirely of words.

I just generated "omen coins car hoof.onion" right now, in a couple of seconds, with my laptop CPU. With a couple of GTX1080s you could easily find some much better .onions than the ones NYT chose.

icc97• 9 years ago

This is a great thing. Tor wants to encourage people to use tor as a normal browser so it's harder to track individuals using tor.

Handy graph for anyone curious about the benefits of Tor [0]

[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/tor-and-https

ape42• 9 years ago

The url is a bit hard to remember. https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/ Is there a directory of .onion sites? (with an easy .onion url)

Gaelan• 9 years ago

There are no “easy” onion URLs. They are essentially random (hash of a key iirc). It’s possible to generate random URLs until you get a prefix you like, but the time it takes increases exponentially with length of the desired prefix.

comboy• 9 years ago

I wonder why namecoin addresses are not a part of the tor yet. Onion urls should be treated more like IPs.

ape42• 9 years ago

I guess there could be a regular website that links to a .onion directory

spyspy• 9 years ago

I recall that Facebook brute forced their way into having an onion url that was easy to remember, by generating millions of them and then picking one that was simple.

jonas21• 9 years ago

That's clearly what the New York Times did as well (though probably with far less compute time than Facebook). nytimes3xbfgragh.onion is the easy to remember name they were able to generate.

0xJRS2• 9 years ago

Its something like facebookcorewwwi.onion - that must have taken a lot of cycles to generate..

ringaroundthetx2• 9 years ago

Ah, so disagreement with an administration is what will make everyone eventually to TOR

Nothing to hide except when the wrong guy gets in power then you feel naked

matt4077• 9 years ago

Do you _really_ think the NYT does this out of some specific fear?

And if yes, does their adoption of https in 2014[0]\ then imply that they were equally suspicious of the previous administration?

[0] https://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/embracing-https/

ringaroundthetx2• 9 years ago

Not the NYT itself, no

Buttes• 9 years ago

More likely for users in China etc.

thatonechad• 9 years ago

Not a huge fan of the NYT but this is pretty cool!

nathancahill3• 9 years ago

Careful, you'll cut yourself on that edge!

nobodyorother9• 9 years ago

Does the onion service still serve the same advertisements their website and mobile app do?

If so, they're leaving their users-who-want-to-stay-relatively-anonymous open to attack via the advertisement vector. Members of that group would be considered high-value targets simply due to their anonymity desires.

I can't see the number of daily users being large enough that they'd lose significant profit by closing that attack vector. Hell, if there was a way to pay NYT enough to disable ads on all their services, I'd do it.

ceejayoz• 9 years ago

If you're using Tor surely you should be disabling third-party and non-onion assets and JavaScript?

nobodyorother9• 9 years ago

Not all entry points do the most paranoid thing, and not options are even available on all entry points.

The Tor Browser Bundle (desktop) has different defaults than Orfox (phone), and I think both will connect to non-onion URLs when connecting to an onion site. Same for JS, ad-block, etc.

reaperducer• 9 years ago

Why not try it and let us know instead of simply making guesses?

nobodyorother9• 9 years ago

I was asking because I'm currently nowhere near a system that I'd trust for this purpose. I'll be near one later and, if you're interested, I'll update the question with my findings.

system33-• 9 years ago

Tor Browser isolates cookies and other browser state into buckets based on URL bar domains.

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

... i.e. first party isolation, one can read more about it on the Tor Browser design document: https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser/design/

sova2• 9 years ago

I am curious about this as well. Tor is anonymous insofar as individual entrances and exits cannot be monitored. The advertising and other tracking pixels that would riddle something like the NYT site makes me think this is how some uncareful kingpin will fall, checking the op-eds.

VVayneTracker• 9 years ago

Can't the nodes be compromised? I've eschewed using it as USG is purported to have taken over entrance and exit nodes using a combination of threats and bribery.

swiley• 9 years ago

curl -H ""

There are zero good web browsers with socks5 support. (which is needed for tor)

nobodyorother9• 9 years ago

As of last weekend, NYT-over-onion serves ads like their other entry points do.

Ajedi329• 9 years ago

Is there a search engine or other convenient discovery mechanism for Onion services?

I know DuckDuckGo has their own hidden service, but it seems that site only returns results from the regular internet, not from other hidden services.

zamber• 9 years ago

hidden services

I think you responded to your own question.

Besides that there are lists of onion services. Apparently there are also search services like https://ahmia.fi/

Ajedi329• 9 years ago

It's the real IP address of the service that's hidden, not necessarily its Onion address. In theory, there's no reason `.onion` links couldn't be crawled and indexed by search engines the same way any other website is.

nathancahill3• 9 years ago

Although there's a risk to using onion directories, since you have to trust that the hash they give you for the New York Times for example, is actually the real hash. It's easier to spoof onion hashes than domain names since domain names are more well known. You'd hopefully catch that you're connecting to nytim3s.com, not so much nytimes3xbfgra3h.onion.

teddyh• 9 years ago

There was abiko, but it seems to be down right now:

http://abikogailmonxlzl.onion/

Illniyar2• 9 years ago

Err... does the tor site still have the 10 views a month for free limit? Are tor users supposed to subscribe to NYT - that will surely blow through any privacy you hope to achieve.

detaro3• 9 years ago

See this subthread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15567778

Illniyar2• 9 years ago

Thanks

woodandsteel3• 9 years ago

I don't know about other browsers, but with Cliqz if I turn it off after 10 articles and turn it on, the NYT starts counting from 0 again.

spodek• 9 years ago

Does anyone know why they posted this story through Medium?

Spivak• 9 years ago

Because their own site is paywalled.

mattdotc• 9 years ago

TimesOpen is an engineer-driven blog. Its previous incarnation was self-hosted on a WordPress stack (separate from our main CMS), but for various reasons it was decided to re-platform.

There were many discussions before settling on Medium and alternatives were considered (such as dogfooding our own CMS). We have a lot of work in-flight to modernize and simplify our publishing stack, and the timing wasn't right to rely on internal tools to publish a new blog.

vintageseltzer• 9 years ago

How widely is WordPress being used at NYT today? Seems like it was used a lot about five years ago but don’t see it much anymore.

nobodyorother9• 9 years ago

Could you thank the folks involved in this? The TOS is great news.

justinzollars• 9 years ago

Awesome!

sidcool• 9 years ago

What would be the advantage here?

mileycyrusXOXO• 9 years ago

From the /r/tor thread System33 posted a comment[0] originally by Alec Muffet explaining why Facebook set up a TOR service, which may answer some of your questions:

Why would anyone run a legal onion service?

Thanks Alec Muffett (OP) for the following summary copied from this comment

Understandably folk tend to think "Anonymity!" when talking about Tor Onions, but in rolling out the Facebook onion we established several clear benefits:

1. better and safer experience for people accessing over Tor: no interference by exit nodes, no bandwidth-contention for exit nodes, no use of exit nodes at all.

2. "good neighbour" - reciprocally, popular sites can unload themselves from eating up scarce exit-node bandwidth.

3. "a peace offering" - people (continue to) use Facebook over Tor; 3 years ago we saw 500,000/month, more recently ~1 million. Overwhelmingly we found (through measurement and assessment) that people using Facebook over Tor were ordinary folk wanting to do ordinary things. especially in times of political crisis. Providing a metaphorical "olive branch" showed that we value their use of the site.

4. Discretion & Trust. Onion Sites are considered to be about "Anonymity", but really they offer two more features: Discretion (eg: your employer or ISP cannot see what you are browsing, not even what site) and trust (if you access facebookcorewwwi.onion you are definitely connected to Facebook, because of the nature of Onion addressing; no DNS or CA shenanigans are applicable.)

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/792mfr/the_new_york_ti...

cJ0th3• 9 years ago

Is this mainly intended for people from non-western countries who need a channel for free speech? Because apart from that I see no point in FB offering an onion service. If anonymity, discretion and trust are what I am looking for than surely FB itself is one of the least appropriate platforms for me.

eggpy2• 9 years ago

The New York Times reports on stories all over the world, and our reporting is read by people around the world. Some readers choose to use Tor to access our journalism because they’re technically blocked from accessing our website; or because they worry about local network monitoring; or because they care about online privacy; or simply because that is the method that they prefer.

AgentME• 9 years ago

Yes, but NYT doesn't need an .onion service for people to access it over Tor. Half the point of Tor is that it works with normal sites too.

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

Allowing readers to choose which security and privacy advantages they want. If I want privacy and security, I'll choose the onion service. If I want security only, I'll take the HTTPS road only.

rayiner• 9 years ago

Comical attempt to give Street cred to the NYT.

eggpy2• 9 years ago

Comical how? Check out their tech blog[0]. I'd venture a guess that they are the most technically adventurous news site, if not one of the more open corporations around in regards to trying new technology and writing about the experience. A lot of what they have to say is pretty interesting.

[0] https://open.nytimes.com/

b1gtuna• 9 years ago

I agree. NYTimes has led with technical prowess the past a few years.

patrickaljord3• 9 years ago

The NYT is so pro-establishment it is probably the last site on Earth that would have its domain taken away from them.

matthewbauer• 9 years ago

Trump would disagree.

patrickaljord3• 9 years ago

I don't think he would disagree they are pro-establishment. He'd love them to be taken down though there is no way he could make this happen.

forapurpose3• 9 years ago

The Times has been blocked repeatedly, maybe even semi-permanently, in China. It gets blocked in other countries too, IIRC.

In the U.S., the Times published Chelsea Manning's leaked State Dept documents, it broke the story on Hilary Clinton's email sever, it reported the Wikileaks' DNC emails for months up to the US presidential election, and now it aggressively goes after Trump. While it's imperfect, I don't see which part of the establishment it so strongly supports.

serf• 9 years ago

While it's imperfect, I don't see which part of the establishment it so strongly supports.

The State Department. NYT is vital in fabricating the history of conflicts and internal problems that have ever affected the United States.

to name a few : Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the War on Drugs, the Indochina wars, Cuba, Mexico, outside-of-country extradition, continual abuse and outright breaking of UN laws and sanctions, etc.

That's not even mentioning their (the NYT) history of character assassination with regards to civil rights leaders, activists, authors, speakers, and alternative thinkers.

...OR you get the Chomsky treatment, and they pretend that you don't exist for a few decades.

I didn't bother with citations, there are plenty to read through with just a cursory search engine query, but since I already invoked the name of the beast, i'll let him tell you about NYT[0].

NYT's is systematically biased in who or what it chooses to illuminate for the public to digest. Don't be surprised when they do good by you -- it's all character building -- just like this news that they're embracing tor.

Boy, aren't they just keen!

[0]Noam Chomsky: The New York Times is pure propaganda: https://www.salon.com/2015/05/25/noam_chomsky_the_new_york_t...

patrickaljord3• 9 years ago

The Times has been blocked repeatedly

.onion is not for sites being blocked in China, you can just use tor and access the nytimes.com web site from there. .onion is for websites that get their domain confiscated by their domain providers or the feds, very unlikely to happen to the NYT. See what happened to sites such as the pirate bay or more recently the neo-nazi site dailystormer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Daily_Stormer#Site_hosting...

iandanforth• 9 years ago

Will this help people in China at all? From an article I ready a while back it seemed like Tor has been defeated there. (https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427413/how-china-blocks-t...)

milofeynman3• 9 years ago

That article is from 2012. It's a constant battle, which has changed a LOT in 5 years.

https://blog.torproject.org/breaking-through-censorship-barr...

https://www.torproject.org/docs/pluggable-transports

jerheinze10• 9 years ago

Well there's meek-amazon[1] which seems to work there. Also I remember I talked last months to some guy on irc at #tor who was using some obfs4 bridges successfully in China. There's also another pluggable transport named Snowflake[2] where everyone can become a bridge by just running some JS in their browser, which may prove to be a good solution (it doesn't work yet in China since it uses Google for domain fronting).

[1] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek

[2] https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Snowflake

schwag09• 9 years ago

Mozilla is also currently matching all Tor donations: https://donate.torproject.org/pdr

Consider donating!

pbarnes_12• 9 years ago

Can someone explain... why?

grzm2• 9 years ago

From the article:

"Some readers choose to use Tor to access our journalism because they’re technically blocked from accessing our website; or because they worry about local network monitoring; or because they care about online privacy; or simply because that is the method that they prefer."

cJ0th3• 9 years ago

That's still a bit of a non answer. More to the point: Why does a mainstream news outlet care about this small group of people?

jsfreedman• 9 years ago

For a publication that openly supported the Iraq war and all the suffering that entailed for innocent civilians, its kinda funny that they're suddenly all concerned about people's rights.

conductor• 9 years ago

What's the point of making it available in the Tor network if their onion site includes a script from www.googletagmanager.com (or an "iframe" if scripting is disabled) thus making it significantly less anonymous?

Onion websites should be isolated and should not initiate any connections to vanilla internet.

Edit: it also loads scripts from www.google.com, tags.bluekai.com, cdn.optimizely.com...

plg• 9 years ago

is it still paywalled on the onion service?

forapurpose3• 9 years ago

I'm seeing a different page at the Tor address than at the regular address. The layout is different:

https://www.nytimes3xbfgragh.onion/

https://www.nytimes.com/

4684499• 9 years ago

I don't see the point.

A hidden service is set for information can not be safely presented on the public Internet. Like what The Daily Stormer did.

If one just wanted to bypass blocking or hide himself from evil third parties, he could just use tor browser to open NYT's regular domain instead of the hidden service domain, no?

Ajedi329• 9 years ago

Onion services are faster on Tor, since you aren't limited by the bandwidth of the exit nodes.

There are also some security benefits, since connections to hidden services are automatically encrypted and authenticated, no HTTPS or trust in Certificate Authorities required (though HTTPS with EV certs can still be useful for identification purposes).

superkuh• 9 years ago

You don't own a traditional domain. You are given temporary permission to use it. A tor onion address is something you can actually own.

RustyRussell• 9 years ago

Tried to show my support by subscribing over Tor, unf:

    This action is not supported over Onion yet, sorry.

Which kind of makes sense, since you were probably about to ask my CC info, but still...

The New York Times Is Now Available as a Tor Onion Service

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