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Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

i’m not sure why. if someone is already using the tor network, presumably they could use it to bypass censorship to access the clearnet bbc site.

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From TFA:

    While the Tor browser can be used to access the regular version of the
    BBC News website, using the .onion site has additional benefits.
    
    "Onion services take load off scarce exit nodes, preserve end-to-end
    encryption [and] the self-authenticating domain name resists
    spoofing," explained Prof Steven Murdoch, a cyber-security expert from
    University College London.

https://security.stackexchange.com/q/81620/6838

Because so much of the bbc website is http, today, in 2019. At least you now get TLS between the browser and the bbc server. Accessing bbc over Tor normally leaks cleartext http to the exit nodes.

The vast majority of the BBC's services use HTTPS nowadays, including BBC News, BBC Bitesize, Sounds/Radio, CBBC and CBeebies, etc. Only pre-2010 news stories are HTTP.

The only other parts that remain HTTP (that I've seen) are certain archived content, e.g. the older Learning[0] and Languages[1] portals.

[0]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/learning/coursesearch/

[1]: http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/german/

Here's fresh article which refuses to be served over HTTPS.

get "https://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghos... Location: http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20191021-the-sea-of-60-ghost...

BBC is one of very few sites on my HTTP allowed list. By default I've disabled HTTP completely.

This very BBC news article is delivered as HTTPS, and if you try to reach it as HTTP, you'll be redirected to HTTPS.

They can get a cert for .onion from Digicert.

isn't a .onion address the hash of a self-signed cert?

if i recall right you shouldn't access clearnet sites from tor if you want privacy. Might be wrong - last time i used tor was ages ago.

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