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

open.nytimes.com

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

#181

Post by nikcub »

sp332 wrote: post #151
0xJRS wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It was over 100,000,000 CPU-hours https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11550922 And they still got extremely lucky to find such a good address. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8538390 It's not usually that easy.

I found blockchainbdgpzk in just under 3 days. It was the sixth blockchain* address I found.

I ran 3x 4 GPU cloud instances on AWS on the old Teslas - which aren't very fast at SHA. IIRC it was doing 15GH/s total

Today you can get ~7GH/s on an Nvidia 1080 so you should be able to find an all-alpha 10 char onion in about a week.

The new cards and some of the password cracking rigs (i'm building a new one now) are able to do SHA1 so quickly that they're a real threat to generating phishing addresses for onions - which is why the DigiCert certificates are required

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

#182

Post by forapurpose »

patrickaljord wrote: post #96

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

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.

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

#183

Post by ryacko »

sova wrote: post #116
VVayneTracker wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

as Ajedi32 states, even knowing entrances and exits, it is SUPRHARD to figure out all the associations, but it has been done in the past for high profile sites. It is also not possible for them to monitor every entrance and exit, and it is akin to watching the entrances to a mall where everyone is dressed exactly the same, trying to identify who shops where. With one-off data, really hard. With regular or periodic da…

I dunno, it is done in China to monitor everything. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/china-installs-20-mi...

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

#184

Post by ryacko »

koolba wrote: post #19
bertil wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (whic…

> 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…

I disable javascript.

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

#185

Post by xorcist »

komali2 wrote: post #95
dublinben wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DV lets you know that you're connecting to the domain that you're connecting to. You already know that with all onion addresses. EV lets you assure that you are connected to the New York Times.

I'm trying to understand onion/tor better, what about Onion addresses specifically make them I guess invulnerable to man in the middle attacks?

Onion domains are a form of content addressing based on public key pairs. Normally onion domains aren't that readable as the nytimes one and look more like a bunch of random letters. (All nytimes did was generate many million key pairs until they found one that looked cool.)

If you fetch web pages from http://abc123.onion you bascially tell tor "connect me to whoever holds the certificate with fingerprint abc123". Any domain validated certificates on top of that is superfluous since you already know which certificate you are talking to. What you don't know is who holds it. This is where organizationally validated certificates can help.

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

#186

Post by ryanlol »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #115
blfr wrote: post #10

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…

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?

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.

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

#187

Post by superkuh »

4684499 wrote: post #170

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?

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.

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

#188

Post by dEnigma »

ryanlol wrote: post #186
JoshTriplett wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

But can you easily get addresses that start with "nytimes" and end in words? (I'm genuinely curious btw)

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

#189

Post by ryanlol »

dEnigma wrote: post #188
ryanlol wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But can you easily get addresses that start with "nytimes" and end in words? (I'm genuinely curious btw)

I'd be inclined to go for something bit shorter for this, perhaps just "times", but yeah.

Lets pretend we've got a $5000 budget.

Quick back-of-the-envelope math shows that a 8xGTX1080¹ box will be able to generate ~3 onion addresses beginning with "nytimes" every second, we can afford 6.25 months of this.

Instead of waiting a really long time, we'll rent multiple boxes and squeeze all that into one month. In that month our servers will find approximately 44055283.1 onion addresses beginning with "nytimes".

At least with the wordlist² I use, without a prefix I discover approximately one "good" onion per 8 million random onions. Considering we've got a 7 character prefix for our 44 million onion candidates, so I'd expect a significantly better rate than just 1/8000000

So yeah, in a month you'd probably find at least 5 "better" onion addresses.

¹ $800 a month https://selectel.com/solutions/gpu/ Shouldn't be a problem for NYT to get a few of these.

² which besides words contains some easily memorable fillers such as "aaa" "bbb" and so on

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

#190

Post by serf »

forapurpose wrote: post #182
patrickaljord wrote: post #96

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

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 whi…

>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...

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