Spinning Up an Onion Mirror Is Stupid Easy

This is a good reminder for myself to get some onion addresses for my sites and spread awareness of Tor.

TIL that Onion-Location is a header, only new about the <meta> element.

  <meta http-equiv="onion-location" content="http://<your-onion-service-address>.onion" />

I am of the view having a .gopher and .onion version of sites is important for avoiding government blocking where possible and to keep information as free as possible.

> I'm not sure if this is generally considered acceptable within the Tor network

Tor is already encrypted, that’s why you don’t need TLS. Some services (Like the hidden service from Facebook back in the days) have https but that was more of a vanity from what I remember.

Whats not easy is dealing with harassment from the law as a result.

This has prompted me to look at how the Tor Project's Arti reimplementation is going. They've got way further along than I realised:

https://tpo.pages.torproject.net/core/arti/

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/core/arti/-/blob/main/CHAN...

Hosting onion services is apparently still a work-in-progress, though, and turned off by default.

It's not a mirror, it's a proxy. If someone encroaches on their free speach and shuts down their hosting account that "mirror" will not save them.

Just saying, this is an important distinction to me and I've been hosting tor nodes since the 2000s.

Archiving information, and making it available, is sometimes more powerful than anonymous proxying.

Especially if there's an anonymous proxy available to that archive. ;)

It is also very useful to expose services to the world wide web behind a restrictive network, Tor takes care of the Nat punching and all that jazz, and you get free dns and encryption as an extra bonus :)

Anyone comment on the http thing? Does Tor layer security in that anyway so "Saul Goodman" or is there anything more needed here?

> Oh, and free speech and anti-censorship and all that jazz.

That jazz is increasingly played by the same band of 185.220.0.0/16 exit nodes, and plays it in a scale which is all but Anonymian.

What’s a better place for hosting a .onion, Panaman or Switzerland?

You can generate yourself a vanity .onion address using https://github.com/AlexanderYastrebov/onion-vanity-address tool. It can also generate vanity client authorization keypair.

One problem with .onion is that it is not for casual sites or people trying to build lasting communities. The Tor Project only prioritizes security and they can and have and will again wipe out the entire tor web to nothing if they feel it is required by security. They have full control of the network. No v2 tor sites exist anymore, none of the communities, they were are just wiped out by the Tor Project because only their security use case matters. They care nothing for communities that use their software. Do not try to build communities on Tor .onion. It'll just be made inaccessible some day. All the hyperlinks will become useless. All the databases of sites, all the discussions, just gone. Because the tor project cannot abide potential lax security of older protocols.

.onion is not a way to own your domain. Even though you may have the private key and no one else does, the true owners of your domain remain the tor project themselves, as they can make it inaccessible to tor clients any time they want. They have before, they will again. And they aren't going to listen to any community feedback about it. Tor .onion is only for people that don't care about longevity or links working. Only for people who have 'security' as their number 1 and only concern.

I wasted a decade building my personal sites and casual communities on .onion. I won't be fooled again. A dot com or org is just as much mine as a .onion is, unfortunately, and at least those don't all disappear every 10 years.

I'm not an expert. I'm asking because I don't know.

Did I understand correctly? You can create a site with a .onion extension without a domain on a hosting service.

I'm thinking. If you can do it this way with .onion, can you do it with something else? That would be a bit unusual.

If that were possible, being able to customize the extensions would be interesting. Being able to customize brand names. Like .mybrand, or .egg, .bread, whatever you want.

What a pleasant read. Informative in all the right places without losing brevity. Thank you.

>I have no interest in running a relay or exit node on my VPS, so I made some minimal changes to the config file

Noting the default configuration does not turn your server into a relay or exit node, in case anyone interprets this that way.

Thanks for offering a .onion, bookmarked for the caddy configuration.

I do something similar like this for xeiaso.net (http://ryelkcbr65vy7pzx26c3rvxya54yuh5ciafth7p6d3p3phpgo2wkz...), but I use Kubernetes so I installed the Tor controller: https://github.com/bugfest/tor-controller. I then added an OnionService pointing to the website: https://github.com/Xe/site/blob/main/manifest/xesite/onionse.... It works pretty great!