Dear members of the Tor community,
we are a research group at Sapienza University, Rome, Italy. We do research on distributed systems, Tor, and the Dark Web. As part of our work, we have developed OnionGatherer, a service that gives up-to-date information about Dark Web hidden services to Tor users.
OnionGatherer is implemented as a Google Chrome extension coupled with a back-end service running on our servers. As the user surfes the Web, OnionGatherer collects all the URLs from the page and adds a green bullet next ot the URL if the hidden service is up and running, an orange one if the system are currently evaluating the address' status or a red one if the hidden service is down. The status of the hidden services is pulled from our servers, which keep track of all the services found by the users and constantly monitor their status. When a new hidden service is found, OnionGatherer checks its status in real time, informs the user accordingly, and adds it to the database.
We believe that OnionGatherer can be very useful to Tor users that are interested in surfing the Dark Web. Indeed, hidden services are born and shut down very frequently, and it is often time consuming and frustrating to check manually which services are still active.
We kindky ask if you can help disseminate our project ---the largest is the number of users of OnionGatherer, the largest the database and the best the service we can provide. Currently the software is in Beta version and released on GitHub at the following link:
Any feedback or issue are really appreciated.
Thanks in advance. Best regards,
The research group:
A. Mei, J. Stefa, M. La Morgia, S. Raponi