Tor - The Onion Router

1633 readers

1 users here now

Tips, tricks and information about the Tor network!

Tor Project

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

imattau@lemmy.ml

Does pointing a ".onion" url to a clearnet site benefit TOR users? (mander.xyz)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Sal@mander.xyz to c/tor@lemmy.ml

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When a website can be accessed via a clearnet and a .onion url, is there a benefit to making use of the .onion url?

Context:

I am considering pointing a ".onion" url to my instance (mander.xyz).

I did some tests with and it seems like mlmym works well with JavaScript disabled. Since JavaScript is often disabled in the tor browser, I could make the .onion url point at that front-end instead.

This would be fun to do, but I wonder if there is a practical benefit to the ".onion" url as opposed to simply accessing the clearnet url via the tor browser.

EDIT: I went ahead and created an onion URL to try out, but I would still like to know if there is an actual advantage to .onion urls:

http://mandermybrewn3sll4kptj2ubeyuiujz6felbaanzj3ympcrlykfs2id.onion/

top 3 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] pedroapero@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes this has several benefits:

some users prefer not to reveal their IP to your server
some users prefer not to be tracked by their internet provider (or by Google via DNS on Android, or by local wifi users or by who knows who)
your onion site is censorship resistant (some users in Russia or else might need it)
your onion can be ddos-resistent (if you enable POW)
your clearnet site might be unavailable for other reasons (unrenewed DNS entry or expired certificate)

[–] 12510198@lemmy.blahaj.zone 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think staying inside the tor network helps reduce the load on exit nodes, which helps all tor users who need to access the clearnet. I think there is even a HTTP header that can be put on the clearnet site that will put a button on the tor browser that tells users that there is a onion available.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Ah - does the exit node participate at all when accessing a .onion? Or is it skipped altogether?

And the HTTP header thing is very cool, I did not know about that!

I have added the header to the site and it works!

I just added the following line to the location / {} block in the https server section:

add_header Onion-Location http://mandermybrewn3sll4kptj2ubeyuiujz6felbaanzj3ympcrlykfs2id.onion/$request_uri;