Re: [tor-talk] Making a Site Available as both a Hidden Service and on the www - thoughts?

[Roger Dingledine <arma@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 11:26:41AM -0000, Ben wrote:
> I've got a (www) site that I'm debating making available as a Hidden
> Service, and I was wondering what peoples thinking on doing this was
> nowadays.

Hi Ben!

Great list of topics. For your first one, I'll paste my paragraph from
the earlier tor-talk thread that included this topic:

"""
I've also been talking to EFF about kicking off a Tor Onion Challenge
(to follow on from their Tor Relay Challenges), to a) get many people
to make their website or other service accessible as an onion site,
and b) come up with and/or build a novel use of onion services, to go
with the quite cool list that we have already but have done a poor job
of publicizing: Pond, Globaleaks, SecureDrop, Ricochet, OnionShare,
facebook's https onion, etc. You see, I used to be on the "making your
normal website reachable as an onion service is stupid" side of the fence,
but I have since come to realize that I was wrong. You know how, ten
years ago, website operators would say "I don't need to offer https for
my site, because my users ____" and they'd have some plausible-sounding
excuse? And now they sound selfish and short-sighted if they say that,
because everybody knows it should be the choice of the *user* what
security properties she gets when reaching a service? I now think onion
services are exactly in that boat: today we have plenty of people saying
"I don't need to offer a .onion for my site, because my users _____". We
need to turn it around so sites let their *users* decide what security
(encryption, authentication, trust) properties they want to achieve
while interacting with each site.
"""

tl;dr: sounds great!

> So I've been scrawling a few perceived challenges and wondered whether
> anyone can think of anything I've missed (or has suggestions on those I
> haven't?):

Don't forget the "decreasing load and reliance on exit relays" benefit,
in case we arrive in that dismal future where it grows increasingly hard
to operate exit relays in a diverse and well-dispersed set of locations.

--Roger

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