
Guardian launches Tor onion provider | Technological know-how
The Guardian web site is now offered to Tor customers as an “onion service”, at the address:
https://www.guardian2zotagl6tmjucg3lrhxdk4dw3lhbqnkvvkywawy3oqfoprid.onion
The Tor network allows conceal its users’ destinations, which will make tracking their web exercise a great deal additional complicated. Tor also makes it more durable for web provider companies to identify what their people are accessing. This suggests buyers can bypass censorship in sections of the environment the place entry to impartial news could be challenging or if sure internet websites and providers are banned.
Guardian visitors have usually been in a position to accessibility https://www.theguardian.com employing instruments such as Tor Browser. These browsers route their communications in excess of the Tor network – thus concealing the reader’s site. But the browsers’ communications have to exit the Tor network for the ultimate leg of the journey in get to get to the site on the standard world broad web.
The introduction of a Guardian onion provider means that the complete interaction pathway concerning a reader and the Guardian usually takes area inside of the Tor network, thereby staying away from possible pitfalls with the “hop” amongst the Tor network and the environment broad world-wide-web service. An case in point of these a risk could be that the “exit node” – the gateway amongst the standard web and the Tor network – could consist of malicious software program or be positioned someplace that is issue to censorship.
Our onion services also promotes anonymity in other approaches. We hope to minimise the electronic breadcrumbs that get still left by reader exercise and that could aid malign actors from identifying them. Users of the Guardian’s onion service will not be in a position to produce Guardian accounts or indication in to their existing account (if they have a person). And the site does not include any 3rd-party advertising or sharing of information and facts with 3rd parties.
Our onion support also disables the scripts that typically operate in readers’ browsers. Some Tor users already disable scripts for security motives. By disabling them for all end users of our onion website we hope to ensure that everyone has the exact same encounter and protections. This ought to also help with efficiency on the Tor community, which is generally a lot slower than common world-wide-web searching as Tor community relies on volunteers to donate bandwidth. We hope that our modern server facet rendering tier will provide a great consumer expertise on our onion internet site. However, some intricate, interactive material may well not function as successfully.
If you previously obtain https://www.theguardian.com employing the Tor Project’s Tor Browser, you should now see a message in your browser’s location bar exhibiting “.onion available”. This gives you the alternative to use the Guardian’s onion services alternatively.
Since 2014, the Guardian has published a SecureDrop web-site as an onion service, to allow for whistleblowers to get in touch securely. For more about our SecureDrop onion service, be sure to see below.
For much more information and facts about the Tor network please stop by https://www.torproject.org/.