[HN Gopher] Self-hosting the Tor Project users forum
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Self-hosting the Tor Project users forum
Author : gslin
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-06-09 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.torproject.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.torproject.org)
| superkuh wrote:
| They moved to this away from the per-article comment system they
| used to have for news posts, etc. In the past anyone (no account
| needed) could post a comment on the documents they posted and
| have it displayed in-line with other comments at the bottom.
|
| But then The Tor Project chose to move to a registration only
| forum where all the discussion of news is hidden away from the
| article. It's really impeded discussion of the tor project's
| decisions... which I think they consider a benefit. They didn't
| like having criticism of things like their early removal of tor
| v2 support on their main pages. Much better to hide in
| registration only forums requiring the latest bleeding edge
| browsers and JS to use, in part of the site no one visits.
| jerheinze wrote:
| How was the deprecation of v2 onions in any form or shape
| "early"?
| haakon wrote:
| It wasn't early; v2 desperately needed to be phased out. The
| crypto was obsolete and the protocol had known flaws. Over a
| year's lead time was given (see timeline:
| https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline/).
|
| However, links live on in a million places, and it's hard to
| motivate hobbyist webmasters of niche onion sites to migrate.
| On /r/Tor, we regularly get people asking why some onion site
| doesn't work, and it's a v2 site. That's two years after they
| stopped working. (I wish Tor Browser would detect a v2
| attempt and give a nice explanation instead of an opaque
| error message, though)
|
| The truth is that whatever schedule they could choose would
| cause allegations of it being too early.
| superkuh wrote:
| Technically there are still plenty of tor v2 infrastructure
| software running out there. It's only the people using the
| modern Tor Project releases that cannot visit these sites.
| The rest of us still can.
|
| I still host a couple v2 onions on brute forced vanity tor
| domain names. Because that's what I wanted to use tor for,
| the name system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything.
| I just didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's
| not mine. On tor I thought I owned my domains because I
| held the private keys. But the tor project relieved me of
| that delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name
| resolution and (mostly) everyone stopped being able to get
| to my sites.
|
| But that's tangential. Regardless of weather tor v2 removal
| was early or not, the switch to secluded, account
| requiring, forums instead of comments was bad. Self hosting
| the bad system doesn't make it better.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _Because that 's what I wanted to use tor for, the name
| system, not to be anonymous or secure or anything. I just
| didn't like having to "rent" a ~.com domain that's not
| mine._
|
| The Tor project doesn't exist for whatever usecase you
| were using it for.
|
| > _On tor I thought I owned my domains because I held the
| private keys. But the tor project relieved me of that
| delusion when they simply dropped support for v2 name
| resolution_
|
| Not routing to v2 domains isn't the same as not owning
| your .onion addresses? The latter is cryptographically
| guaranteed, is it not?
| superkuh wrote:
| They've made it very clear they don't care now. But I
| still remember when it was part of what they advertised
| about tor. A lot has changed since 2010 in the tor
| project.
| zaroth wrote:
| Interesting issue with the U2F account lockout potential - due to
| the anti-phishing protection and the domain name changing I
| assume?
| telotortium wrote:
| Surely there must be a way to automatically migrate users upon
| login, but that still doesn't help the people who don't sign in
| - 2 weeks is not much time
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| I thought this article would be about them hosting their
| discussion forum on a .ONION address.
| mburns wrote:
| Sounds like that is in the cards:
|
| >This will offer us more control over the forum's configuration
| and allow us to provide an experimental onion service for our
| users accessing the platform via the Tor network.
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(page generated 2023-06-09 23:01 UTC)