Anonymized Content Now Available to the Average Internet User (featuring: File-Sharing)
Tor2Web is a new discovery courtesy of Wired's Threat Level and it’s all about anonymizing web surfers and preventing information about them from being exposed.
Tor's hidden services protect the location of those publishing a service or anonymous content on special websites accessible only via Tor. The novelty is that from now on these sites (offered through the virtual .onion domain) will be also available for the ordinary web surfers.
"Aaron Swartz, a Reddit developer, and Virgil Griffith, creator of WikiScanner, have created a new service called tor2web that gives users access to website hosted anonymously on the Tor network."
"Though Tor — "the onion router" — is more famous as a privacy tool designed to prevent tracking of where a web user surfs on the internet, since 2004 the system has allowed users to host servers as well. Unlike conventional servers, these Tor "hidden services" cannot normally be traced to the person operating them."
It seems that file-sharing is also enabled and people are already using the service with this purpose. Due to it being quite a difficult task, anonymizing file-sharing hasn’t gained much popularity so far but things might change direction.
The article goes on explaining:
"Reaching the hidden sites through tor2web is also currently slow, given the nature of the relay process. Although once a user accesses a page the first time, it becomes cached and therefore quicker to access thereafter. Swartz says the service currently does a little more routing than it needs to do but he hopes that will be fixed at some point."
"Another drawback is that many of the .onion web pages have strange alphanumeric URLs that make it difficult to determine a site's content before you visit it. Swarz says he's thinking of putting together an index or directory to make it easier to categorize and find useful hidden sites as more of them become available."
