Tor in 2022

I've never heard of snowflake relays. What are they?

The problem is that the URLs themselves got deprecated: the entire interlinked ecosystem got destroyed. Maybe think of what would happen if all of our current TLDs got deprecated tomorrow, and in a year or two support for them would start getting dismantled. Every single link anyone has ever posted on Hacker News is now broken. Now what?

You are all making it sound like this isn't some big deal: that people just needed to "get their act together"... but how do you rebuild the world wide web after breaking every link in the web? Whose job is it even to fix every single link on every single page and stored in every single comment in every single database?

Now, you can certainly argue that the old system was broken by insecurity and thereby had to die. But that just means the entire concept of onion services was some temporary art project more than a platform on which people could build the kind of ecosystem we have on the "normal" world wide web. At best, it means that people needed to come up with some extremely different way of thinking about what those .onion addresses really were, as they were clearly more like IP addresses than hostnames.

I personally can't help but think there could have been some better transition plan. Like maybe a mechanism where people can leave cross-signed redirects from v2 to v3 domains, and maybe even they would only be honored if signed before some date, or maybe there is a disambiguation dialog for competing redirects that also shows the time the redirect was published (these being attempts to deal with "in the future someone could crack this and start making arbitrary redirects for any old site").

But that clearly didn't happen and now that entire ecosystem is dead. Maybe it will rebuild, and maybe one day it will be stronger than it is now, but frankly... when that happens, wouldn't you expect people to start pointing out that the cryptography of the ECC curve they are using is now subject to breaking by quantum computers or whatever we have in another 15 years? Maybe they will handle that transition better, or maybe the mere thought of that will serve as a lesson to not rebuild inside that design.

Truly, though, a design that doesn't take this into consideration from the beginning is inherently flawed. As I noted in passing earlier: these .onion names were clearly more like IP addresses, and so you needed some kind of translation later on top of that to provide later portability. As much as I often hate on the current players in "decentralized DNS" (for various reasons that they could have avoided), that's the kind of concept that clearly is going to win the day going forward.

A new tool from Tor:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634636

It is unclear to me if you meant to reply to me or someone else, because this is wholly unrelated to the criticisms I raised against the author of the source in the parent's post.

However, I will say, using Tor to access your VPN strips away much of the benefit of using Tor, to the point that you might as well just use a VPN (sans Tor). I suppose if you want a single-circuit Tor connection that appears to be a static non-Tor IP address, sure. But blindly recommending one way or the other without knowing someone's use case, threat analysis, and risk tolerance is foolish.

>Now, you can certainly argue that the old system was broken by insecurity and thereby had to die. But that just means the entire concept of onion services was some temporary art project

An insecure Tor is less than worthless.

Tor is not trying to be a community or be the next geocities. It is an evolving security and privacy project, adapting to the landscape as it needs to, in an effort to anonymize and protect it's users.

>a platform on which people could build the kind of ecosystem we have on the "normal" world wide web

This was never the goal of Tor, and may be the source of your frustrations. Tor has one fundamental mission: deploying free and open source anonymity and privacy technologies.

It is a shame that links will be broken, and it sucks that you feel like something you built up is being torn down. But arguing that it should be kept insecure because of the friends you've made along the way is exactly the opposite of Tor's mission statement.