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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

They're not on TOR because normal people aren't on TOR. We've had various ways to distribute files with almost no way of getting caught for decades, but they're all a pain in the ass to use, requiring at the very least a native client program to access, so most people won't ever use them.

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Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.

That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.

You can't just lay out a supposed fact that 99% of users don't care about speed without providing some sort of citation...

I think you misread, I read it as 99% of users don't care about anonymity

> Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry

Second class how? I open the tor browser, I paste the link, I go there.

Even simpler, advertise your onion domain by including a Onion-Location header in the clear-net site’s response.

The Tor Browser automatically detects and offers to redirect you there. No need to memorize the onion domain.

This was the original purpose of the alt-svc[1] header, although it's rarely used for that purpose and instead used for upgrading clients to QUIC.

[1] https://www.jonaharagon.com/posts/securing-services-with-tor...

That sounds like a pretty nice place to add malware to a site once it's hacked and avoid detection.

We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc.

I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.

> Why aren't … operating solely as an onion service on TOR?

> They’re not on TOR because

Any downsides to being available on many decentralized overlay networks in addition to plain https, other than (compute/net/human) resources?

no advertising $

Do they even have advertising normally?

yes i believe so

Anna doesn't have any advertising. Their income is purely driven off donations, most of which are part of subscription packages that offer faster downloads.

yeah meant more libgen, which i believe some instances have ads.

anna's has "donations for speed" and dark pattern hide the links to the fast external websites

I believe this should work: <http://genotypeinczgrxr.onion/>

Via: <https://old.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/mqo0sg/tor_onion_po...>.

The sites are ON Tor. They were not exclusively on Tor for reasons others have stated: most people don't have Tor or know how to use it, though I suspect that situation may evolve.

Doesn't z-lib have a kind of hybrid approach where some things are available on clearnet but for certain account-based features it's TOR?

"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.

The Web hasn't required anything beyond what's installed for nearly the entirety of my life, and when it wasn't already there, someone would toss a CD at me in the parking lot and I'd be golden

You hang out in unusual parking lots.

Talkin AOL baby!

Edit: But admittedly I do hang out in some unusual parking lots.

Maybe start handing out TOR Browser discs at those parking lots. Be the change you want to see.

That sounds like a depths of winter type project

I use libgen on tor.

> I use libgen on tor.

I believe the context here is the GGP's comment about using Tor Onion services. Are you using those to access libgen?

Is this [0] not exclusively for the Tor browser? It states immediately below (on this [1] page) to "Make sure you're using Tor", and will only open in the Tor browser. I've actually used LibGen with Tor before, and treat it like the library not making ones borrowing history public knowledge

[0] http://libgenfrialc7tguyjywa36vtrdcplwpxaw43h6o63dmmwhvavo5r...

[1] http://library.lol/fiction/33618E71454C5165A39564CB861466AB

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