{"id":182043,"date":"2016-01-11T20:26:00","date_gmt":"2016-01-12T01:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/01\/11\/first-tor-news-site\/"},"modified":"2016-01-11T20:26:00","modified_gmt":"2016-01-12T01:26:00","slug":"first-tor-news-site","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/01\/11\/first-tor-news-site\/","title":{"rendered":"First Tor News Site"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rather unsurprisingly, it&#8217;s the not-for-profit news organization <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wired.com\/2016\/01\/propublica-launches-the-dark-webs-first-major-news-site\/\">ProPublica<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it\u2019s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a \u201chidden service\u201d on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site\u2019s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica\u2019s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cEveryone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind,\u201d says Mike Tigas, ProPublica\u2019s developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. \u201cWe don\u2019t want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Of course, any privacy-conscious user can achieve a very similar level of anonymity by simply visiting ProPublica\u2019s regular site through their Tor Browser. But as Tigas points out, that approach does leave the reader open to the risk of a malicious \u201cexit node,\u201d the computer in Tor\u2019s network of volunteer proxies that makes the final connection to the destination site. If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn\u2019t SSL-encrypted\u2014most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page\u2014then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing. Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica\u2019s Tor hidden service, by contrast\u2014and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor\u2014the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor\u2019s anonymity all the way to ProPublica\u2019s server.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think that this is the start of a trend, as near as I can figure out, there is no way to monetize a Tor node through advertising, though I imagine that the classified ad section would be \u2026\u2026\u2026 different \u2026\u2026\u2026 and I am sure that the FBI would find this <b>very<\/b> interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rather unsurprisingly, it&#8217;s the not-for-profit news organization ProPublica: The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it\u2019s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica.On &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[997,1064,1066],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-media","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182043"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182043\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}